SEC Football Q&A: Is It Time to Eliminate Divisions in the SEC?
Florida will play LSU in Baton Rouge this weekend with a chance to wrap up its second straight SEC East title.
But at this point, winning the SEC East is the college football equivalent of being the winner of a dizzy bat race. Sure, you won, but you looked pretty foolish getting to the finish line. The East is 2-9 against its West counterparts, with Georgia's win over Auburn and Kentucky's win over Mississippi State being the only two points of pride.
What can the SEC do about the the imbalance? That question and more are answered in this edition of SEC Q&A.
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No, because it would cause the conference to abandon the SEC Championship Game.
The NCAA ruled to deregulate conference championship games earlier this year, which will allow the 10-team Big 12 to hold its own starting in 2017 despite not having divisions. But as Dan Wolken of USA Today noted in January, that came only after a compromise that kept round-robin scheduling in as a requirement for conferences with fewer than 12 members.
The SEC obviously can't play a 13-game regular season with no out-of-conference matchups. So as the rules are stated right now, there's no way it can hold a conference championship game if it eliminates divisions. That compromise came, as Wolken noted, after the 14-team ACC flirted with some creative ways to place teams in its conference championship game, including eliminating divisions.
Now if that round-robin rule eventually does get taken out, I'd absolutely be for the SEC eliminating divisions completely and simply taking the top two teams in the overall conference standings after tiebreakers.
Could that get messy? Sure.
The conference would run the risk of rematches and stripping the importance of the regular season. The most dangerous of which would be the possibility of the Iron Bowl between Auburn and Alabama taking place in back-to-back weekends—the first on campus and the second in Atlanta in the SEC Championship Game.
But what's worse, a rematch between two rivals in the SEC Championship Game or a championship weekend blowout due to unbalanced divisions?
The latter.
It wouldn't take much to make this happen, either. The SEC currently has one permanent cross-division rivalry built into the schedule. If it eliminates divisions and gives each SEC team two (or more) permanent rivals, it would preserve most of the current big games while also allowing the rest of the teams in the conference to play each other more often than they do now.
Is there a second-best team in the SEC right now?
The contenders are Texas A&M, Auburn, Tennessee, LSU and Florida, but all of them have recent losses, injury concerns and enough holes for anybody to make a viable argument against them really easy.
Since you're twisting my arm, I'm going to reluctantly say LSU is the second-best team in the SEC right now.
Running back Leonard Fournette has been banged up all season, but all backup Derrius Guice did against Arkansas was rush for 252 yards, score twice and earn co-SEC Offensive Player of the Week honors. What's more, the Tigers defense is allowing just 4.62 yards per play, a conference-best 26.92 percent red-zone touchdown percentage and has kept the Tigers in every game this year.
But that passing game is hard to trust. Quarterback Danny Etling was fine against Arkansas when he threw for 157 yards, but he looked beyond lost in the 10-0 loss to Alabama two weeks ago and hasn't proved that he can win games against good defenses with his arm yet.
I'd take LSU right this instant over an Auburn team without running back Kamryn Pettway and quarterback Sean White banged up, over a Texas A&M team with a hobbled defense and backup quarterback Jake Hubenak taking the snaps, and over Tennessee and Florida—both of which have enough names on the injury list to complete a novel.
As for which team will be No. 2 in the SEC at season's end, I don't want to dodge the question, but I literally have no idea. It likely depends on how competitive the SEC East champ is versus Alabama in the SEC Championship Game, what happens on Thanksgiving night between LSU and Texas A&M in College Station and how competitive Auburn is against the Crimson Tide.
For now, I'll say LSU. But I reserve the right to change that on a daily basis, or even by the end of this column.
The SEC being "the best conference in America" is sort of a knee-jerk reaction at this point. But I feel that the perception is not only diminishing (last weekend's miserable performances from Top 10 Texas A&M and Auburn teams, specifically), but that the importance of conference power/prestige is also becoming much less of a factor in the grand scheme of things.
In 2013, the last season of the BCS, Florida State topped Auburn for the national title out of a pretty average (and that might be a big compliment) ACC. The next season, Ohio State won the inaugural College Football Playoff out of a Big Ten that finished the season with three teams in the AP Top 25.
The conference didn't make those teams any better or worse than what they were. They were elite—plain and simple.
Right now, the SEC is led by a lone elite team—Alabama. After that, there are flaws all over the conference, which is exactly what other Power Five conferences can say after their one or two elite teams.
Is Wisconsin—the Big Ten's third- or fourth-best team—better than LSU? Yes. We saw that on opening weekend. Is Colorado better than Florida or Tennessee? You bet. It has proved it on the field and navigated through several key injuries in the process.
To put it simply, the SEC is no different than any other conference. The middle of the pack is flawed, beat up and unstable. The only difference is that the SEC's best team looks like a monster.
The season-ending arm injury to safety Marcus Maye is the most recent injury to hit a Florida defense that's been ravaged lately. Maye's absence, along with the injuries that will keep lineman Bryan Cox and linebackers Jarrad Davis and Alex Anzalone out, will make it more difficult to slow down the LSU running game.
Impossible though?
Not at all.
LSU is one-dimensional. That's a fact of life for the Tigers, and one that has bitten them in each of their three losses in 2016. It could come back to haunt them on Saturday as well, because Florida still has talented players in the defensive backfield who can drop down and help out in run support.
"Their speed, they on the edge, their attack, very well-versed on the defensive line, a lot of stunts that come after you," LSU interim head coach Ed Orgeron said in emailed quotes. "They pressure the quarterback, and they have a lot of speed."
Florida can move Marcell Harris or Nick Washington into Maye's place, utilize the versatile Duke Dawson in a different way or give more reps to Jeawon Taylor.
Ultimately, the Gators won't have enough to slow down the LSU running game. Guice (and possibly Fournette) will get rolling and put the Gators in enough of a hole to get a big win in Death Valley.
Quotes obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted. Statistics courtesy of CFBStats.com unless otherwise noted. All recruiting information is courtesy of Scout. Odds provided by Odds Shark.
Barrett Sallee is the lead SEC college football writer and national college football video analyst for Bleacher Report, as well as a host on Bleacher Report Radio on SiriusXM 83. Follow Barrett on Twitter @BarrettSallee.
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