Jump to content

Legacy SEC Teams Had to Prove It on The Field


Huckleberry

Recommended Posts

15 minutes ago, NoctambulantBrobdingnagian said:

Why would I know that, plus that completely ruins the joke. So, sorry, you are the blond skinny girl with braces until further notice.

That must be what you close your eyes and imagine when you have sex with black men amiright? Prison life must've been hard for you.

9 minutes ago, thunderlounge said:

Did That Guy just get That Guy'd?

Nay my friend.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/3/2025 at 1:19 PM, Dewey said:

We should have a rematch? 

harold ramis surprise GIF

You mean like the "War of 1812?" Andrew Jackson got two shots at the Brits in the Revolutionary War and in 1812 and won them both, then became President in 1828. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/3/2025 at 5:36 PM, ztejas said:

I want a hot mixed-race 35 year old with nice tits and an ass but I don't want her too fit I want maybe some stretch marks and some character like she's been through a lot but she's ready to love and settle down and she enjoys a good 6.5 inch white peener and...

 

Wait. What were we talking about?

La Xbox GIF

  • Haha 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

David Ubben: Don’t get too giddy, SEC football haters. The king of the sport will be back, and soon

Quote

It’s been a beautiful two seasons for SEC haters tired of the league’s dominance. An SEC team hoisted the national title trophy in 13 of 17 seasons between 2006-2022. Five different programs accounted for those titles, spreading the wealth around and cementing the conference’s status as king of the sport. Then last season, it was forced to endure the indignity of watching a Big Ten team (Michigan) beat a soon-to-be Big Ten team (Washington) for the national title.

It was just the second time since the Texas-USC classic to close the 2005 season that the SEC sat on the sidelines while the national title was decided. Now, as the College Football Playoff semifinals are set to begin, the SEC might be back in the same seat. Notre Dame and Penn State face off Thursday in Miami. A day later, Texas takes on red-hot Ohio State as a six-point underdog in the Cotton Bowl.

The Longhorns, even as first-year wearers of the SEC patch who weren’t part of the decades-long conversation about the league’s supremacy, are the league’s last hope. The South’s place in the sport may have slipped the past two seasons, but rest assured: The league’s firm foundation is suited to handle the sport’s shifting sands better than any other conference. It will be back.

College football — especially roster construction and management — is changing. Stockpiling the kind of depth of talent that helped fuel Georgia’s back-to-back titles in 2021 and 2022 and Nick Saban’s decade of dominance at Alabama has never been harder. In the transfer portal era and with the advent of name, image and likeness (NIL), some argue doing so is impossible.

But the SEC’s cringeworthy slogan — “It just means more” — works because it’s true. Michigan, Ohio State and Notre Dame have the three biggest fan bases in the sport, but none have access to the kind of talent schools across the SEC have in their backyards. Talent wins out.

Consider Michigan’s path to last season’s national title: It had just two five-star prospects on its roster. It joined Auburn in 2010 and Clemson in 2016 and 2018 as just the fourth national champion that didn’t sign a top-five recruiting class in the previous four years. It had the nation’s 14th-most talented roster, according to 247Sports’ Talent Composite, which is weighted toward recruiting rankings.

What Michigan did have was NFL talent, proving that ranking was far from gospel. Michigan’s roster featured 13 picks in last year’s draft — nine of whom went in the first five rounds. The Wolverines have four more players who were major contributors on last year’s team who are top 50 prospects in this year’s draft, according to The Athletic’s NFL Draft analyst Dane Brugler.

Michigan’s title was a monument to Jim Harbaugh’s ability to scout and develop, building a title-worthy roster in a manner seldom seen in modern college football. It was done by one of the best coaches in the sport. It may never be duplicated. It’s certainly not a sustainable, long-term plan to churn out championships.

But consider this season’s Ohio State team, now the betting favorite to win the title in Atlanta later this month. The Buckeyes famously spent $20 million assembling this roster, and although acquisitions like running back Quinshon Judkins from Ole Miss and safety Caleb Downs from Alabama made the biggest offseason headlines, the bulk of that money went to making sure players such as WR Emeka Egbuka, DE Jack Sawyer, DE JT Tuimoloau, DT Tyleik Williams and running back TreVeyon Henderson came back to chase a title rather than beginning their NFL careers.

Now, it looks well-positioned to pay off after an unthinkable loss to Michigan in the regular-season finale. That $20 million is believed to be at or near the top of the market for a roster in the sport this season, and generally, the biggest spenders in the NIL era have been the teams that haven’t won big in recent years before money became the currency of roster building in college football.

Oregon, Tennessee, Texas A&M, Texas, Ole Miss and Florida were among the most aggressive programs in the earliest days of NIL. The sport is changing. The blueprint for building perennial championship contenders is evolving by the year.

But places like Georgia, Alabama, LSU and others in the SEC are always going to be committed to doing whatever it takes to build a winner — at any cost. In the interim, that almost certainly means funneling more money to collectives and NIL on top of the upcoming money for revenue sharing schools will start paying players as a result of the House v. NCAA settlement.

And access to talent still matters. Much of it — especially fleet-footed 300-pounders who play along the line of scrimmage — is concentrated in the South. Pulling talent away from the region, even with NIL money, will always be a task difficult to complete and almost impossible to sustain.

Georgia and Alabama still rank first and second in the 247Sports Talent Composite, but it’s clear their rosters are not the same caliber as those that helped them capture titles. Building a juggernaut may or may not be possible amid the swirling winds of change in the sport, but the SEC is still the best bet as the place where it’s easiest to build a winner.

In the 247Sports Talent Composite rankings, six of the top nine teams are in the SEC. Thirteen of the top 25 are in the SEC. Just six of the top 25 are in the Big Ten and just three — Ohio State, USC and Oregon — are among the top 10. Even with Michigan’s bounty a season ago, the SEC still had 11 first-round picks to the Big Ten’s four.

The SEC signed eight of the top 15 recruiting classes in 2024, and in 2025, it has eight of the top 11 classes after the early signing period. This year, the Big Ten has had better teams at the top of the league than the SEC. It has had a much better year. It’s done so because as the sport has changed, programs such as Ohio State and Oregon have done the best job adjusting to those changes, while programs like Alabama and Georgia have tried to adapt versions of their old model for success into the new world of college football.

The safe bet is it won’t stay that way for long. Talent wins out.

(Scott Dochterman) Everything’s coming up Big Ten football: How it flipped SEC’s conference supremacy script

Quote

Big Ten members generally share common principles and philosophies, but rarely do their football programs link arms and back up one another the way other conferences do. There’s no “B-1-G” chant to match the “S-E-C!” that echoes in the stands after a victory against another conference. The collective-good sentiment comes in the offseason. The play on the field stands on its own.

Fans waved “Ohio Against The World” flags at Ohio State’s first two College Football Playoff games, and the Buckeyes took that mindset into games against SEC foe Tennessee and Big Ten champion Oregon. After beating Tennessee in chilly Columbus, Ohio State’s players were concerned only about their well-being, not what the win meant to the conference they represent.

“I understand people have pride in their conference and pride in their schools,” guard Donovan Jackson said after a 42-17 first-round victory against Tennessee. “But I have pride in mine, and I just want to win as many games as possible with the group we’ve got and just keep going from there.”

Similarly, Penn State coach James Franklin said this to reporters a day before his team topped Boise State 31-14 in a CFP quarterfinal: “Obviously, we want to represent the Big Ten, and that’s important to us. But, ultimately, I’m worried about Penn State. I’ve got respect for coaching in the SEC because I’ve been there. (I) take a lot of pride in representing the Big Ten. But ultimately, I’m worried about these guys, the guys in that locker room.”

If ever there was a time for the Big Ten to boast about itself, it’s now. Legacy brands Ohio State and Penn State make up half of this week’s CFP semifinals, where they will play Texas and Notre Dame, respectively. The league has won nine postseason games and is 4-1 in head-to-head matchups with the SEC, including a depleted Michigan squad’s upset of Alabama, the highest-ranked team left out of the CFP, in the ReliaQuest Bowl. The on-field results go hand-in-hand with Big Ten success off the field, two years into a landmark media rights contract and one year into West Coast expansion that has enhanced the league’s visibility.

Yet the Big Ten office has remained quiet this month. Second-year commissioner Tony Petitti, a longtime TV executive who was instrumental in setting up the Bowl Championship Series in 1998, routinely takes cell phone photos of marching bands in pregame and postgame celebrations but only for his own posterity. He doesn’t post on social media, and he prefers the on-field action to speak for itself. That was true before the 2024 kickoff featuring North Carolina at Minnesota in August and didn’t change an hour before the Oregon-Ohio State Rose Bowl.

When asked whether Petitti would like to discuss his teams’ football success knowing the Rose Bowl champion would join Penn State in a 50 percent Big Ten semifinal round, a league official said it’s not Petitti’s style to brag but he might consider talking later in the Playoff if the rest of the games play out in the league’s favor.

That’s a very real possibility. Should Ohio State and Penn State win this week, it would mark the second consecutive year that two current Big Ten teams will face off for the national championship. Last year, Michigan won the CFP title by ousting Washington, which left the Pac-12 for the Big Ten in August. The Wolverines beat Alabama, and the Huskies topped Texas (just before the Longhorns formally joined the SEC) in the semifinals.

“This would really completely change the paradigm of college football that has been all about the SEC, particularly when (Nick) Saban was at Alabama and then Kirby Smart going for a three-peat last year,” SEC Network host Paul Finebaum said on ESPN’s “SportsCenter” last Friday. “Imagine if it’s two Big Ten teams and the Big Ten is ruling the world. I’m not sure what we’re going to do down here in SEC country but hang our head.”

The good news for the Big Ten is this might be just the start of a successful run. Northern teams long were at a postseason disadvantage because they took inclement weather into account when developing their style of play, then played almost all of their biggest bowl and Playoff games in pristine track-meet conditions. With at least one round of on-campus CFP games, colder temperatures now will become a factor in the national title chase in a way they haven’t before, which may lead everyone outside of the Midwest to do some adjusting of their own.

“I was the first one talking about, when are we ever going to get these SEC schools up to the Midwest in like December?” ESPN college football analyst and former Heisman Trophy winner Desmond Howard told The Athletic. “I want to see Alabama play up in the (Horseshoe). I want to see Georgia play up in Happy Valley. I want to see LSU play in the Big House in December. “Weather can be the great equalizer, and I just don’t think those schools in the SEC are built for that.”

The Big Ten enjoys the most lucrative media rights deal in college sports history, pulling in around $1 billion annually through the 2029-30 sports season. The income generated from those contracts with Fox, CBS and NBC provides 16 of the 18 schools (Oregon and Washington have half shares through 2029) with about $75.2 million from the conference office during the current fiscal year. That’s a $14 million jump from fiscal year 2024. That revenue increase will help the league’s 18 schools pay their athletes directly, once the House v. NCAA settlement becomes permanent in April. The projected revenue sharing cap for the 2026 fiscal year, which begins July 1, is around $20.5 million per school. Most Big Ten schools plan to meet or approach that cap, but banter among the lower-income departments has officials hedging most of their answers with “hope to” or “we have to find a way” by mixing external fund raising with internal cost control.

The current NIL model has helped Big Ten schools compete above board for portal targets and, perhaps just as important, retain athletes with eligibility who had NFL options. That was critical for Ohio State, which had a robust collective that spent $20 million to keep an elite defense intact and brought in key pieces like quarterback Will Howard, safety Caleb Downs, running back Quinshon Judkins and center Seth McLaughlin through the portal.

The internal funding mechanism will enable the Big Ten to compete more vigorously for out-of-market athletes, who traditionally have stayed near their homes in football-rich states of Texas and Florida. Recent expansion to California, Oregon and Washington has provided Big Ten programs in the Eastern and Central time zones with fertile recruiting areas.

“There’s a ton of talent out there,” Iowa general manager Tyler Barnes said. “Now, with the Pac-12 being the Pac-2 … kids out there are a little bit more open to travel versus kids in the Northeast.”

West Coast expansion has added large markets for Big Ten Network, of which the league owns 39 percent (Fox owns 61 percent). The combination of brand power and competitive excellence among the four new additions has reinforced the Big Ten’s strengths in many sports other than football. But between Washington’s CFP appearance last January, Oregon’s No. 1 ranking for most of the 2024 season and USC’s rich tradition, the newcomers have contributed to a melting pot of style and substance on the football field.

“The thing you’d say about this conference is that it does have a great variety of what success looks like,” Oregon coach Dan Lanning said before the Rose Bowl. “You can win in a lot of different ways in this conference. There’s some teams that are ground-and-pound teams in this conference. There’s teams that throw the ball. There’s a lot of different defensive schemes. So, I think the variety more than anything sticks out that you have to be able to prepare for different situations, different moments throughout the season when you play the teams in this conference.”

But Indiana’s CFP inclusion whipped the Big Ten’s detractors into a frenzy, as skeptics within and outside the SEC looked to discount the Hoosiers’ 11-win season because of their strength of schedule. While calling Indiana’s first-round loss to Notre Dame, ESPN broadcaster Sean McDonough said, “I don’t understand why there’s this presumption from many that the Big Ten is so much better than the ACC or the Big 12. I’m not sure what that’s based on.

“I think they need to lose the assumption that the SEC and the Big Ten are clearly head and shoulders above everybody else, particularly the Big Ten.”

ESPN broadcaster Kirk Herbstreit added to the conversation the next morning by saying Indiana “was not a team that should have been on that field when you consider other teams that could have been there,” alluding to Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina, the 9-3 SEC teams who landed on the wrong side of the bubble. A day later, Ohio State’s throttling of Tennessee froze out the conference-level implications of those takes. Within a fortnight, Michigan and Illinois beat Alabama and South Carolina in bowl games.

“It goes a long way, in my opinion, in debunking a lot of this noise that these SEC schools deserve to be in the CFP, because of whatever rationale these people try to come up with,” said Howard, who played at Michigan. “But it always boils down to because they’re in the SEC.

“No one’s talking about the way that Ohio State beat the brakes off of Tennessee, like they’re not even mentioning that. They would rather talk about Indiana or talk about SMU, but that game happened, too. You can’t ignore it. So, it’s always funny to me, the way people pick and choose what they want to criticize depending on what narrative they’re trying to push.”

Unlike other conference commissioners, Petitti chose not to weigh in publicly on his teams’ Playoff positioning before the final selection and did not speak up during the Indiana debate. Petitti’s understated personality came to the forefront in a Nashville hotel ballroom in October when he and SEC counterpart Greg Sankey sat side by side following a joint meeting between the league’s athletics directors.

The leaders are as different as the regions and conferences they represent. Over 45 minutes, Sankey responded to most of the questions, while Petitti sat by and answered more matter-of-factly. The commissioners manage college athletics’ two most powerful brands and are the driving force in future CFP negotiations, which could include more Playoff teams and a restructured format. A surging Big Ten gives the league more clout based on performance, which will legitimize changes that might benefit it and the SEC. It also intensifies the competition between those two leagues, which brings more attention and eyeballs.

“We’ve done well to work together,” Sankey said in October. “We still want to beat each other. I wanted to win the game in Vegas (USC over LSU in Week 1), and he was there, and he was happy. We won the game in Ann Arbor (Texas over Michigan in Week 2), and we won the game in Madison (Alabama over Wisconsin in Week 3). So, I mean, good for me. Now, he’s gonna try to get retribution.”

If Ohio State can beat Texas this week, it’s safe to say Petitti has gotten more than his share of retaliation for those regular-season losses to the SEC. Should the Big Ten win a second straight national title, it would set the tone for the offseason and flip the narrative that its reputation exceeds its football substance. The Big Ten-SEC rivalry is about to intensify as the external factors dictating both conferences’ strategies change, and the Big Ten perhaps is in a better position to succeed than at any time in the last 50 years.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.



×
×
  • Create New...