Measuring SEC’s weight in new CFP

Published 10:40 am Friday, December 5, 2014

On the eve of the latest Southeastern Conference championship game, there seems to be more than the usual nervous pacing in the conference.

No one seems to be sure exactly how the game — the best offshoot of the league’s 1992 expansion — fits into the new era of the College Football Playoff.

Mainly, the game has a lot of pomp and no small circumstance, and it’s usually great theater and all … but … uh … but what if Missouri should foul up and win the blasted thing?

It hardly seems to matter that Alabama, once again carrying the banner for the league’s national championship hopes, is dang near a two-touchdown favorite.

Most everybody has been predicting Missouri losses every week for the last month now, lest the SEC might be saddled with a champion that lost at home to Indiana. But the Tigers keep reminding everybody that, yes, they are in the SEC now and keep defying the odds by winning.

It doesn’t matter if it is the SEC Least, and its two cross-division wins came against the teams that finished sixth (Texas A&M) and seventh (Arkansas) in the West.

At some point Mizzou is going to get some respect — much of the league hierarchy just hopes it’s not this afternoon, else the SEC, having properly cannibalized itself, could get shut out of the playoff party.

Of course, you used to hear the same sort of alarmist wrangling back in the ancient BCS days, too.

Visionary Commissioner Roy Kramer invented the conference championship game just before he invented the BCS, which eventually begat the current playoff.

It was a stroke of genius. Some fine print that apparently nobody noticed allowed for an extra game if a conference had at least 12 members and split itself into divisions.

That was as good of a reason as any to let Arkansas and South Carolina in back then.

It sure wasn’t the allure of the Little Rock, Arkansas, and Columbia, South Carolina, television markets.

The title game quickly became the most-watched college game of most years up until the national championship game, with a weekend atmosphere and pre-game electricity that blows any bowl game to smithereens.

Mainly, it gave the SEC a chance to show off its wares to the rest of the country, and pretty well turned Southern Cal-Notre Dame into an exhibition.

Other conferences gradually followed suit.

And did people back then appreciate what Kramer had stumbled across?

Listen to this ringing endorsement from then-Alabama coach Gene Stallings, uttered just a few hours before the Tide played Florida in the very first SEC championship game.

“With adding this game,” he said forlornly, “The SEC will never win another national championship.”

Really, that’s what he said.

He was smart. He is by all accounts a good and decent man.

But, gosh, was he ever wrong.

The most amazing thing is that even now, all these years later, after much testing and analyzing and irrefutable data, some SEC coaches still see the game as a dangerous stumbling block for that big enchilada.

Less than a month later, Alabama, having beaten Florida in the inaugural SEC title game, upset Miami in the Sugar Bowl to — much to the shock of Stallings, no doubt — win the 1992 national championship.

At the time, the SEC, without the conference title game as a road block, hadn’t won a national championship in a dozen years, since Georgia in 1980.

And Georgia’s one title was the only SEC team not named Alabama and not coached by Bear Bryant that had won a national championship since LSU in 1958, a tidy 34 years.

And once they put that albatross in front of them?

Over the following 21 years, with the SEC title game in place, five DIFFERENT SEC teams conspired to win 11 national championships, including four teams combining to win seven straight.

And it wasn’t the SEC championship game’s fault that Auburn didn’t make it eight straight last year. It played in the national championship game.

The “right” team tends to win the SEC championship game, for whatever reason.

There have been several years when it was basically a play-in game, with either team advancing with the win.

Only LSU’s upset of Tennessee in 2001 kept the SEC from having a team in the BCS title game that might have gotten there by sitting idly by.

On the other hand, LSU was the first team to win two BCS titles, and the Tigers wouldn’t have been in either the 2003 or the 2007 championship game without a mulligan in the Georgia Dome to sweeten the pot. Same for Florida in 1996.

But this is a new age.

It will be interesting to see if the old rules apply.

And, at this point, can you really trust Missouri?

Better yet, can the rest of the conference actually pull for Alabama?

l

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU

athletics. Email him at

shobbs@americanpress.com(MGNonline)