A decade-by-decade look at SEC players taken in NFL Draft shows growing allure
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The debate surrounding the best conference in college football can rage on and on, but there’s no argument as to which conference the NFL likes the most.
The numbers are staggering. Even as the SEC’s seven-year streak of national championships ended in 2013, the league maintains a string of 10 years leading all conferences in players drafted.
Not so coincidentally, that incredible run began with the draft that followed the first of those seven straight national championships: Florida’s win over Ohio State in 2006.
The SEC has seen all three of its highest outputs over the last four years, setting the conference record with 63 in 2013 before sending 54 in 2015 and 51 in 2016.
When taking a decade-by-decade glance in comparison to the other Power 5 conferences, the shift that made the SEC the premier conference couldn’t really be any more consistent. For the purposes of this story, we’re going to consider draft data going back to the NFL merger in 1970.
In the 1970s, the SEC averaged 32.2 players drafted per year, lagging behind the Big Ten (38.9) and Pac-8/10 (33.5). In the 1980s, the SEC climbed into second with 35.2 as the Pac-10 took the lead with 38.9.
The 1990s saw the SEC (34.0) edge the Pac-10 (33.6), then leave everyone in its draft dust ever since.
Keep in mind for the illustration below that the Big 12 wasn’t officially formed until 1996.
The SEC had a comfortable cushion of about six more players per year over the Big Ten in the 2000s, and the gap has widened a significant degree in the 2010s with the SEC averaging nearly 50 players drafted while the ACC is next up with only 35.6.
Speaking of the ACC, which is home to two of the last four national champions, the conference has seen a rise in every decade, coming a long way from averaging just 13.6 players per draft in the 1970s.
The Big 12 is going in the opposite direction, seeing a decline in each of the last two decades, now only producing about half as many players in the present one. The Big 12’s problem only seems to be getting worse as evidenced by the bite-sized number of invitations it received to this year’s NFL Combine.
What about the future? Well, the Big 12 was the only Power 5 conference without a 5-star recruit in the Class of 2017. Yikes.
However, that’s enough Big 12 bashing. Let’s get back to praising the SEC. Our beloved conference is seeing its athletes get taken in waves early on. Since 2010, the SEC has almost double the total amount of first-round selections (65) than the next-closest conference, the ACC (34).
Of course, that’s where Alabama hears its name called plenty. The Tide have had a first-round selection in each of the past eight drafts, the nation’s longest current streak. Over the last 10 drafts, Alabama has the most first-round picks nationally with 18, and Florida is right behind it with 15.
Even though this constitutes as another Big 12 diss, it’s worth mentioning that Texas A&M has had at least one first-round pick each year since leaving the Big 12 for the SEC in 2012.
Consider that the Aggies have six since the 2013 draft after only having four total from 2000-12 (we included the 2012 draft here since that was coming off A&M’s last season in the Big 12).
Although the Big Ten is third in total players drafted since 2010, it came very close to topping the SEC in 2016 — 47 players taken compared to the SEC’s 51.
With that, the Big Ten (2016, 2012) joined the ACC (2015, 2014) as the only other Power 5 leagues to send 40-plus players in any single draft over the last 10, doing so a total of four times. The SEC, by itself, has done that seven times.
But it was really the turn of the century where the college football landscape turned in the SEC’s favor, changing the makeup of NFL rosters at the same time. We’ll see if that trend continues at the end of April.
Born and raised in Gainesville, Talal joined SDS in 2015 after spending 2 years in Bristol as an ESPN researcher. Previously, Talal worked at The Gainesville Sun.
