It’s Monday morning, so it’s time for me to let you all know what’s been on my mind the past week. For another week, I’m going to run through some excellent reporting from Ross Dellenger for Yahoo Sports, this time about the SEC spring meetings and all the info that has come out of there. This one might be a little more wide ranging, since there isn’t one story’s worth of reporting I’m really diving into.
Let’s get started.
1. The first quote I saw that sent me reeling a bit.
“I have people in my room asking, ‘Why are we still in the NCAA?’”
That’s a quote from SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey.
I have talked before about splitting college football and college basketball off from the current system so that the Olympic sports can go back closer to what they used to be in terms of conferences and NIL and that type of stuff, which I stand behind. I think that would be a good idea.
This is not that.
The SEC is obviously powerful, it’s not powerful enough to stand on its own outside of the rest of college sports.
Would the conference seasons still be interesting? Sure. Would the conference tournament be interesting? Sure. Would any of it matter if the SEC can’t participate in the College Football Playoff, March Madness or the College World Series/Women’s College World Series?
No.
We can talk all we want, and the SEC administrators did a lot this week, about how much stronger the SEC is than the rest of college athletics, and for the most part, I agree. I don’t think the gap is as wide as it’s made out to be, but the SEC is an incredibly strong conference in just about every sport right now.
But to say it could stand on its own completely is ludicrous.
Back in February, I talked about the difference in television ratings between the NFL and college football. I’ll run back the numbers a little.
The Super Bowl this year had an average of 127.7 million viewers.
The College Football Championship averaged 22.1 million viewers (Michigan vs. Washington was the highest in CFP history, averaging 25 million. Weird how the two most watched didn't involve the SEC).
The SEC Championship averaged 16.6 million. That’s a significant drop-off, though not as significant as I expected.
It did dominate the other conference championships, next up was the Big 10 at 10.5 million, but it’s not enough to say the SEC could make up the money it needs to by exiting the major tournaments.
Sankey didn’t say the SEC was really considering it or that it was a possibility, but the fact that people are even bringing it up in the room and Sankey thought it was worth bringing up in front of a major audience full of reporters is telling.
The SEC is strong, but it’s not that strong. I’m telling you guys from a slightly outside perspective having lived the first 27 years of my life nowhere close to the SEC, the rest of the country doesn’t care that much.
Growing up, I loved college football, so I had to care a little bit about the SEC because LSU, then Florida, then Alabama were winning all the time. But I wouldn’t have cared at all had they not been title contenders. And no one outside of the conference area is going to buy it if the SEC were to split off and claim “Our champion is the REAL national champion” especially since this type of move would assumedly come with NCAA teams being barred from playing SEC teams in the regular season as well.
2. There was a lot of talk about how the SEC should be more heavily weighted by the playoff committee.
