Reports of SEC’s demise greatly exaggerated

Published 12:43 pm Sunday, January 11, 2015

Saw it on the news.

But I double-checked anyways.

It was all over the Internet, too, but you know how that goes.

Sometimes that’s like reading the headlines as you’re checking out of the grocery store, your Weekly World News and whatnot where aliens are forever mating with mutant werewolves, rutabagas grow to Superdome proportions and Elvis was just spotted over on aisle six.

So I did due diligence before jumping to any knee-jerk conclusions.

Yet this one appears to be on the level.

Ohio State and Oregon both landed safely in Dallas Friday in advance of Monday’s very first College Football Playoff national settle-it-on-the-field-type championship.

So those nasty rumors appear to be true.

Ohio State-Oregon.

Yeah, something’s missing.

It seems awkward, just doesn’t seem quite right. Can’t put my finger on it but … oh, that’s it!

They really are going to stage a college football national championship without the Southeastern Conference having one dad-blamed thing to say about it.

Not even Alabama. Not even Phyllis from Mulga.

Your champion may be Oregon, it may be Ohio State. But the loser and the free world will be spared the familiar chant of “SEC … SEC!” with the closing credits.

Does Commissioner Mike Slive know about this?

To hear the other conferences whine, wasn’t the old BCS system, specifically manipulated to insure that the SEC got a spot, from whence superior speed and freakish defensive ends could then take over?

What went wrong?

Wasn’t Slive the early ring leader for getting the four-team playoff installed to replace the BCS? Did the always-smartest man in the room miscalculate?

Well, settle down.

My guess is temporary sun spots, a brief malfunction, early system growing pains, an unexplainable glitch.

Nothing more, nothing less.

The SEC streak wasn’t going to last forever.

What was it, eight straight years with a team in the national championship?

And even last year when the streak of seven consecutive titles was broken, it wasn’t exactly a howitzer dropped on the league.

It was hard for the rest to live vicariously through Florida State’s razor-thin victory over Auburn. After all, the Seminoles were always suspected of being an SEC team dressed in ACC clothing.

But this year the title game is set and it’s the clunky Big Ten and the no-defense Pac-12 (which takes stereotyping to a new, possibly dangerous, level).

There is a chance that this is nothing more than temporary insanity.

Oh, but from outside of SEC country, the great huddled masses, your tired, your poor, mostly your SEC-fatigued, have let loose with a loud and taunting hallelujah — Ding Dong, the SEC is dead.

Probably not for long, but there’s not much the SEC can say about it for now.

It wasn’t just Alabama’s travails against The Ohio State — remember, the Buckeyes had long been the SEC’s favorite whipping boy to run donut wheelies around when they’ve dared wander out on the big stage.

The Ohio State is now 1-10 against the SEC in bowl games. Actually, 2-9 on the field, but the NCAA made them give back a fairly recent Sugar Bowl victory over Arkansas.

OK, but head coach Urban Meyer had vowed all along to fight fire with fire, to get him some of those “SEC Athletes” to make it a fair fight.

Mission accomplished — along with a seemingly bottomless supply of quarterbacks.

Side note to Oregon: I wouldn’t knock Cardale Jones out of the game. The way this particular next-man up progression is going, you probably don’t want to even see what the Buckeyes’ fourth-string quarterback looks like.

Still, it’s not like getting the Buckeyes’ blueprint means Purdue and Indiana will suddenly slap foreheads and start loading up on that mythical SEC Athlete.

But it went beyond Alabama.

The SEC was laying eggs all over the bowl season, often even to the Big Ten.

Then, right on schedule, came a ding-ding on my email folder, a missive straight from SEC headquarters.

“SEC sets bowl record with seven wins.”

Nice try, spin doctors.

Technically, seven wins did tie the record, but of course the SEC had a shattered-record 12 chances to get there — the 7-5 overall record was an unquestioned downer.

And I’ve never been one of those who’s suspicious of bowl games as an accurate barometer.

On the contrary, it seems whatever edge a team might lose is offset by the month to get fresh legs and healed bruises (if not — yeah, looking at you, LSU — to pull a quarterback out of a top hat).

Yet the bowl season even seemed to cause some SEC in-house bickering.

The much-maligned SEC (L)east, which itself had been suffering from a mild strain of SEC West Fatigue, is feeling pretty good about going 5-0 in the bowl games, while the West fiddle-faddled to a 2-5 mark.

Well, in this case, at least we have other data to work with.

It doesn’t change the fact that in head-to-head regular-season matchups, the West still went 10-4 against the East.

We can also suspect that the rest of the country celebrating the SEC demise is premature.

To quote the immortal Bluto Blutarsky in the “Animal House” classic: Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

l

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU

athletics. Email him at

shobbs@americanpress.com

(MGNonline)