Seldom Earning Championships? No more bad acronyms for the SEC.

The Big Ten has some
big shoes to fill
to keep up with
the dominating SEC.

It’s been a long time coming, but I needed to dwell upon this rumination for a while before I made it official. I watched the highlights of the national championship game again and again, and it saddens this Big Ten fan to admit the following:

The SEC is currently the best football conference in NCAA D-I.

My favorite college football stats site, cfbdatawarehouse.com, has an interesting all-time conference rankings page, subdivided into conference leaders by total points made up of winning percentage points, schedule points, national championship points, and Big 4 Bowl points. Here’s how the two conferences fare:

Winning Percentage Points: SEC (589.27); B10 (574.68)
Schedule Points: B10 (707.93); SEC (676.16)
National Championship Points: B10 (1350.00); SEC (1150.00)
Big 4 Bowl Points: SEC (1570.00); B10 (1095.00)

Total Points: SEC (3,985.44); B10 (3,727.61)

Here’s what those numbers tell me:

The SEC is slowly creeping up in schedule points year after year, because the Big 10 is primarily a fight between Michigan and Ohio State (and occasionally Penn State) every year. The SEC has mad team talent year after year, and it’s beginning to show in these point totals.

The Big Ten is naturally going to lead the SEC in National Championship points. Why, you ask? For the same reason that the Ivy League’s win percentage skyrockets above both the SEC and the Big 10: They’ve been around the longest. Though it helps my Big 10 argument, it’s undoubtedly a skewed stat.

Big 4 Bowl Points are an interesting category. The SEC leads that by a wide margin…so the argument could be made that the Big 10 teams just muscle eachother around every year because each team is overloaded with talent. The truth came out after the major bowl games this year, though. Year after year, the Big Ten seems to get dominated by other conferences in post-season, high-level bowl games. Teams like Michigan and Ohio State can toot their own horns all they want before December, but the perennial conference powerhouses can’t seem to consistently get the job done against the better teams from other conferences.

A long time ago, I quipped to a colleague that the SEC stood for Seldom Earning Championships. The conference is quickly stepping up…Tennessee’s on the rise again (though they didn’t beat my Lions this year…YES!), Florida seems to be consistently in the mix, and LSU and Auburn are always contenders. Now that Nick Saban’s about to bring his leftover Louisiana mojo to Tuscaloosa, things are continuing to shape up quite nicely for the SEC.

No matter what the polls say at the end of the year, I have to gauge how good a team is by how they’d match up against the country’s other great teams. After seeing Michigan and Ohio State get licked by the USC and Florida, respectively, I’ll need to see some bowl wins from these corn-eating Midwesterners before the Big Ten can be considered the top conference in the land.

It’s hard to say at this point that the Buckeyes would have had a chance against JaMarcus Russel’s LSU offense or Auburn’s “We work harder than you” mentality. It’s even harder to say that Michigan could have countered either one of those teams or the national champion Gators.

It’s time for the Big Ten to step up their game if they want to stay in the NCAA D-I race.