- The SEC used to feature college football’s most powerful bullies. Not anymore.
- Texas squanders NIL riches, fails to live up to frontrunner status.
- SEC still full of playoff contenders, but teams playing catchup to Ohio State, Miami.
Blame NIL if you must, but that’s not the full telling of this story.
Blame transfer free agency. Blame Nick Saban’s retirement. Blame the combination of these ingredients that spawned an uprising of parity.
The SEC lacks a clear-cut national championship frontrunner. How come? Well, assign blame to whichever culprit suits your narrative.
Just don’t forget to also blame Texas.
Because, the NIL landscape is tailor-made for Texas. In this pay-for-play era, who’s outspending the Longhorns, the supposed crown jewel of this past round of conference realignment?
“We’re navigating the NIL space, I think, as good or better than anybody,” Texas coach Steve Sarkisian said on “The Herd with Colin Cowherd” before the season.
Well, bravo, Bevo. The Longhorns can thump their chest as NIL champions. Does that come with a trophy? It’ll be the only one this team wins.
With Texas flopping, the SEC lacks a dominant frontrunner
If Ohio State became the first program to openly buy a national championship, then Texas was supposed to be the second.
Then, the games started, and Texas revealed itself to be a pricey pretender. The Longhorns went the way of Pets.com, an overhyped investment gone splat.
The five-star quarterback named Manning looks overwhelmed. The offensive line is feeble. The defense is permeable.
The SEC once supplied 13 national champions in a 17-year span and trumpeted its superiority ad nauseam, but this iteration of the conference lacks a bully.
Oh, where art thou, Saban?
Texas might possess the SEC’s most talented — or, at least, the most expensive — roster, but it’s not performing like the conference’s best team. With the SEC’s preseason frontrunner playing like a paper tiger, the SEC is left battling for fourth place, staring up at Ohio State, Miami and Oregon. Those three programs are crushing it in the NIL space, and their stars are playing like stars.
SEC teams chasing Ohio State, Miami, Oregon
The SEC is no land of paupers. It takes more than a few shekels to assemble the transfer hauls like the ones amassed by Mississippi and LSU, the latter of which joins Texas in failing to deliver a return on investment.
It takes a war chest to amass a five-star-studded roster like the one at Texas.
The SEC, though, surrendered some of its advantage after the rules of engagement evolved to allow above-board pay-for-play and transfer free agency.
From the 2006 through the 2022 seasons, five SEC programs won at least one national championship. In that span, just three programs not within the SEC won a national title: Florida State. Ohio State. Clemson (twice). That’s it.
If you’re scoring at home, that’s SEC 13, and everybody else four.
Saban had a big hand in that. His Crimson Tide delivered six of those 13 national championships, but the SEC’s dominance didn’t stop at the GOAT.
The SEC ruled the four-team playoff, and the Bowl Championship Series that preceded it, with a well-honed strategy: Sign and stockpile talent, retain talent, develop talent. It’s a Jimmies and Joes game, as Darrell Royal used to say, and the SEC attracted the richest supply of five-star Jimmies and four-star Joes.
Sure, someone like Jimbo Fisher would wisecrack about what maybe did or didn’t go on under the hood during this run of dominance, but let’s not diminish the SEC’s reign of terror or how it pulled it off.
In the SEC, recruits could expect to find gleaming facilities, elite competition, accomplished coaches who built a track record for developing NFL talent, and fan bases with unbridled passion. Games are played in cathedrals full of 100,000 screaming fans.
Who could blame blue-chippers for staying in the South or flocking there from other parts of the country?
“They say girls are prettier here, air’s fresher and toilet paper is thicker,” then-Missouri wide receiver T.J. Moe said before the Tigers’ first season in the SEC.
Elite prospects wanted to play for Saban and Alabama so badly, they waited their turn on the second string before a starting spot opened. In some seasons, Alabama’s ‘B’ team probably would have been a Pac-12 frontrunner.
You know what happened next. Transfer rules relaxed, and who wants to sit the bench when another school dangles an NIL deal and a starting opportunity? It’s not just that, though.
Miami didn’t go from the Pinstripe Bowl to the penthouse just by buying up second-stringers. It plundered Carson Beck, one of the nation’s best quarterbacks, off Georgia’s roster, and installed elite receivers around him, better receivers than Beck had at Georgia.
There’s money everywhere, not just in the South. Out in West Texas, billionaire oil tycoon Cody Campbell tried to buy a playoff bid for Texas Tech, and he might just pull it off.
The deepest collection of talent remains in the SEC. Texas A&M — oh, sweet crude! — is staging an uprising. Ole Miss keeps rearing its head. Even as Texas stumbles, Georgia wobbles and Alabama searches for its cloak of invincibility, the league, top to bottom, is sturdy.
Arizona State could attest to that. The Sun Devils lost to Mississippi State this season.
Missouri turned back Kansas. LSU beat Clemson. Tennessee walloped Syracuse. Texas A&M toppled Notre Dame.
There were a few gaffes, sure. There’s bound to be in a 16-team conference, but, six weeks into the season, the SEC has 10 teams ranked in the US LBM Coaches Poll. The conference enjoys an advantage on the Big Ten in the quest to stockpile the most playoff bids.
Even after NIL, free agency and conference realignment reshaped the sport, the SEC’s well runs deep as ever. It just lacks a superboss.
Blame two-loss Texas. The Longhorns wasted their war chest.
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network’s senior national college football columnist. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.
