NCAAF
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.
Advertisement
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.
GO DEEPER
Woe is the SEC: Playoff shows the rest of the country has caught up
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.
Advertisement
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.
Advertisement
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 expected to come from 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.
(Photo of the Texas Longhorns: Dale Zanine / Imagn Images)
Subscribe to The Athletic for in-depth coverage of your favorite players, teams, leagues and clubs. Try a week on us.
David Ubben is a senior writer for The Athletic covering college football. Prior to joining The Athletic, he covered college sports for ESPN, Fox Sports Southwest, The Oklahoman, Sports on Earth and Dave Campbell’s Texas Football, as well as contributing to a number of other publications. Follow David on Twitter @davidubben
