Curt Cignetti is right: The SEC has taken a backseat to the Big Ten… but for how long?
By David Wasson
Published:
History is written by the victors.
That phrase is so often (and erroneously) attributed to Winston Churchill. But here over 80 years later, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if the phrase someday soon became associated with Curt Cignetti.
The verbose Indiana coach, who has won 27 of 29 games in his Hoosiers tenure and became the latest standard bearer for the Big Ten conference, could have easily crowed that exact sentence at last week’s Big Ten Media Days. Flanked by the league’s 3 consecutive College Football Playoff trophies, one of which was Indiana’s prize from a 16-0 campaign in 2025-26, Cignetti dropped some thinly veined hints at the Southeastern Conference’s presumed backslide from the pinnacle of the sport.
And as much as any SEC-centric wag wants to start picking apart Cignetti’s assertion that the Big Ten is college football’s big dog and the SEC is stuck fighting for scraps… we can’t.
The Big Ten is better right now. The hardware and bowl win-loss record is there (Big Ten at 11-5 and SEC at 4-10 last season, not to mention a 10-7 edge for the Big Ten against the SEC in head-to-head bowl games over the past 2 seasons…) staring at the world in black and white.
But for how long?
Examining the past 3 CFP winners – the Big Ten’s Michigan, Ohio State and Indiana – it is fair to say that one has backslid from its historic title-winning season and another simply has an eon’s worth of data points to suggest a reversion to form is on the horizon. That leaves the Buckeyes, who eked their way into the expanded 2024 CFP field before breaking off a title-winning run all while a segment of their fan base wanted their coach fired.
Even the most powerful of power programs experience a bit of cyclical nature, an ebb and flow from falling confetti to falling short. Not to mention that it takes a tremendous amount of fortune to win a national championship – that rare combination of good matchups, lack of injury issues and kismet – to even be in the right place at the right time with the gold on the line.
With the margin between a championship-winning team and a semifinal loser being startlingly small, it is no wonder going back-to-back is so rare. Which is why the SEC could easily go on a 3-year run of winning titles starting this year and suddenly it would be “woe unto the Big Ten” without any structural changes by any of the contending programs or their respective conferences.
The argument could also be had that, from top to bottom, the SEC is the “better conference” anyway year after year. The rigors of an SEC schedule vary a bit from program to program and season to season, but said rigors are a definite factor in overall “strength” at the end when it comes seeding time but an overall “weakness” when it comes to extending a season to 15 or 16 games.
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Not that all 18 of the Big Ten’s teams are exactly leaping on the bandwagon of “greatest conference ever” like some of the current top dogs. In fact, it is a virtual lock that they aren’t sitting around in East Lansing or Piscataway right now going “oh wow, look great the Big Ten is” any more than they were reclining in Starkville or Lexington crowing about the SEC’s nattys just a couple years ago.
This is also a perfect time to shoot down one of the popular talking points – that Name, Image and Likeness has evened the playing field across the country, thus allowing the Big Ten to take control. The SEC wasn’t playing a different financial game than their Big Ten compatriots prior to NIL, after all, so why exactly is it in the Big Ten’s favor now? It isn’t like Mark Cuban (Indiana) money spends any better than jambalaya (LSU) money or oil (Texas and Texas A&M) money now that everyone can go deep in donors’ pockets.
Yes, the Big Ten distributed more total money to its schools ($1.37 billion) than did the SEC ($1.03 billion) from the 2025 fiscal year. But the average distribution wasn’t markedly higher – as Big Ten programs averaged $76.1 million to the SEC’s $72.4 million. Not that $3.7 million is chump change, but in reality that difference is less than 5% and also probably gets sopped up by recent Big Ten stadium expansions at many schools.
Nevertheless, there was Cignetti last week – completely in his element with both a microphone at his disposal and a 16-game winning streak in his sails – hinting at Big Ten domination for ever and ever and ever. Will the last 3 years’ of dominance continue, either in Bloomington or Columbus or Ann Arbor… or another magical Big Ten port of call?
Probably not. National parity and deep pockets across the SEC say otherwise, even if recent history is very much being authored by the mighty Big Ten.
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An APSE national award-winning writer and editor, David Wasson has almost four decades of experience in the print journalism business in Florida and Alabama. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and several national magazines and websites. His Twitter handle: @JustDWasson.
