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The SEC had a wild ride in 2014. From questions about whether two teams could make the inaugural playoff to talk of the SEC West being the greatest division ever, to Alabama heading into the playoff as the odds-on favorite before what turned out to be a rough bowl season, things were mostly up before they ended down in December and January.
Looking back, there’s room for an outside perspective that the SEC’s collective worth is fueled by Alabama’s sterling reputation. While this may have been a down year for the conference, anyone who watches the SEC on a weekly basis knows the weekly grind teams have to go through just to survive.
However, if you remove Alabama from the mix — a futile exercise, since it completely changes the scope of recruitment throughout not just the conference, but the country — you can see the SEC would be substantially weaker.
Isn’t that the case everywhere, though? Let’s look at how the reputations of the four other Power Five conferences would have looked this season without their top team.
ACC
Florida State was dethroned in the national semifinals, but the ACC finally had some merit to its claims of being on par with the top conferences in the country this year. Clemson flew under the radar thanks to its quarterback issues, but finished with a higher final ranking that its preseason standing. Georgia Tech clearly proved its worth, knocking off Georgia and dominating Mississippi State in the Orange Bowl, while Louisville lurks as a resurgent threat under Bobby Petrino. Duke pulled off nine wins, but after that there’s a pool of mediocrity or worse beyond that.
Big Ten
Ohio State redeemed the entire B1G by owning the College Football Playoff, but the conference wasn’t quite as down as it has been in previous years. The conference still had two teams able to compete with any, as evidenced by Michigan State and Wisconsin both pulling out tight wins in their bow games. Without Ohio State around, both of those teams are likely sitting in the top 10, although Wisconsin’s loss to Northwestern serves as a serious black eye. Once you get past those two, though, the rest of the way is ugly, as Nebraska, which fired its coach after the season, would have been the third best team in the conference.
Big 12
We’ll call TCU the top dog in the Big 12, considering they finished the season ranked higher than Baylor and will likely be ranked in the top three to start 2015. The Big 12 was regarded as one of the best conferences in football thanks to the collective might of TCU and Baylor. However, Oklahoma was the biggest disappointment in college football after starting the year No. 1 in the preseason polls, Kansas State was solid but lost all of its marquee games except for the one against Oklahoma, and the rest of the conference was firmly mediocre or worse. One or two bullies beating up on everyone else doesn’t make for a strong conference.
Pac 12
The Pac 12 is the conference that everyone pointed to as the new dominant bunch in college football. Remove Oregon, which won a weak North division, and you still have three 10-win teams in the South: Arizona, UCLA and Arizona State, as well as nine-win squads Southern California and Utah. That divisional strength was tempered by Colorado’s 2-10 season, which weakens the comparison to the SEC West that boasted seven seven-win teams. However, without Oregon, the Pac 12 as a whole looks a lot like what we had in the SEC this year.
A former freelance journalist from Philadelphia, Brett has made the trek down to SEC country to cover the greatest conference in college football.
