The Southeastern Conference’s unofficial mantra of “my conference can beat your conference” is falling on selectively deaf ears outside of the South heading into year two of the College Football Playoff.
Despite reigning supreme with seven-straight national championships from 2006 to 2012, the SEC is at a crossroads coming into the 2015 season after the league’s elite took a step back in 2014, including the Tigers, who finished with their worst record (8-5) since 2008.
“For our team, eight wins is certainly not enough,” said LSU coach Les Miles at SEC Media Days last week. “We played some really good ball clubs in that eight-win season and played them very close, but our goal is the playoffs, our goal is the SEC championship. We’re shy of our goals, and we want more.”
During the BCS era, few questioned the SEC’s ability to dominate other conference’s top teams with the league posting 88 wins in 152 games since 1998, according to saturdaydownsouth.com
In its 8-1 record in BCS national championship games, the SEC’s participants won by an average of more than 14 points per game, topped by Alabama’s 28-point destruction of Notre Dame in 2012.
The conference banner didn’t only fly during the postseason in the BCS era with SEC traditional powers controlling their season-opening marquee matchups against Power Five conferences, which included teams from the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big 10 Conference, the Big-12 Conference and the Pac-12 Conference.
In its wins against North Carolina and Oregon to open the 2010 and 2011 seasons, respectively, LSU won by an average of 9.5 points. The Tigers also blew out Washington, 41-3, in its second game of the 2012 season.
With the SEC dominating the elite of other conferences at every level, there was no question the conference would get a spot in the national title game. The league had at least one representative in the last eight BCS National Championship games, including the all-SEC matchup of LSU and Alabama in 2011.
But all that changed in 2014 with the implementation of the College Playoff where Ohio State took the first title under the new system while the SEC stumbled with ranked teams tallying five losses, including Alabama’s 42-35 loss to the Buckeyes in the national semifinal.
Despite postseason losses, the SEC’s depth shined during the regular season with the emergence of Ole Miss and Mississippi State after each posted just a 3-5 conference record the year before.
The Rebels rattled off seven wins to start the season, including a 23-17 win against then-No. 3 Alabama, before falling after a 10-7 loss to LSU on Oct. 25, 2014.
After finishing no better than fourth in the West in coach Dan Mullen’s first five years, Mississippi State exploded on the scene, climbing to No. 1 in the polls and earning the second spot in the SEC West behind Alabama.
“The Western division certainly, really top to bottom, is as good as there is,” Miles said in an interview with ESPN’s Mike and Mike on Monday. “There was a point in time where some of those schools could not compete with the higher end. Across the top … they compete with everybody, so it’s exciting.”
The growth of the historically lower teams in the conference, such as the Bulldogs, and their ability to challenge the traditional powers on a weekly basis during the conference schedule continues to make the SEC the hardest conference to play in.
Within the playoff system, the grind of the SEC will be crucial to preparing teams to compete against the rising elites from other conferences, such as the 2014 National Champion Buckeyes.
You can reach Morgan Prewitt on Twitter @kmprewitt_TDR.