SEC: Bowl season proves SEC still the best conference in college football

Just when it seemed the landscape of college football’s conferences was shifting, the monster of the south was awoken.

After the previous two seasons signified a leveling out between other members of the Power Five and the SEC, the Southeastern Conference seems to have returned to its dominant ways. Their 8-2 bowl record, which is the most bowl wins for a conference in one season, has been filled with quite a few drubbings. It’s got plenty of support to show the SEC is still clearly at the pinnacle of the sport.

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There’s no need to try to sell the idea of the conference being the developmental league for the NFL. The SEC was never that much better than its peers. It did, however, lead all conferences in players drafted the last nine years in a row, and certainly have brought home the postseason hardware. Aside from the stretch of seven straight national champions between 2007-2013, the SEC has been an all-around menace during bowl season.

From the 2006-2007 bowl season until now, the SEC has led all conferences or tied for most bowl wins every season, going 64-32 in that stretch. They’ve also finished with the most or tied with the most top 25 teams at the end of every year but one since 2006.

The Big Ten and Pac-12 shared much of the preseason attention with the SEC, two conferences that looked stacked enough to contend for supremacy when the bowls came around.

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Now the talk is dwindling from those two, and for good reason. The Pac-12 played with a now 8-6 USC team in their conference championship, and were shut out of the College Football Playoff. The Big Ten finished 5-5 this bowl season, including a poor showing by conference champion Michigan State against Alabama.

The SEC, meanwhile, is currently outscoring their opponents 366-199 during these bowls. Auburn, Miss State, and Arkansas all won by at least three touchdowns. LSU and Ole Miss won by four. Alabama and Tennessee nearly won theirs by 40 points.

Florida’s loss to Michigan may be the conference’s only real setback. Scoring 41 points on a top-ten defense can’t be ignored, but the Big Ten has lost their other three games against the SEC, including a 38-0 embarrassment the Crimson Tide gave the Spartans in their playoff semi-final.

This is coming a year after the SEC’s 7-5 bowl record and Alabama’s loss to eventual champion Ohio State brought many to conclude that the Big Ten was slowly taking some of the SEC’s power. That was certainly the case, but a regression has arisen, and it may be awhile before the Big 10 or any other conference can reverse it.

Though the individual teams care much more about their own wins and losses, the conference had something to prove coming into December. After getting steam-rolled by TCU last season, Ole Miss stuck it to Oklahoma State to get revenge against the Big 12 in the Cotton Bowl. And after Miss State was overwhelmed by Georgia Tech’s option offense last season, they torched N.C. State for 51 points in quarterback Dak Prescott’s final game. Then of course, there was the Crimson Tide destroying the Spartans.

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But even with all the success over these past couple of weeks, that’s not going to convince everyone. Having half of the top 10 recruiting classes (LSU, Ole Miss, Alabama, Florida, and Auburn) this year won’t. Neither will the fact they’ll finish with up to six top-25 teams and nine with at least eight wins. No, the naysayers won’t stop unless the SEC’s finest turn in a big performance on January 11.

That’s when Alabama will take on Clemson for the National Championship, an opportunity for the Tide to return to their own glory and to give an always-hungry fan base what they expect every year. And if they do, they won’t only be returning to their reign over college football, but will be reassuring the SEC’s title of the king among conferences.