Is the SEC lagging behind the Big Ten in talent? The NFL Draft gives a clear answer
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The 2025 college football season has been over for months, but the 2026 NFL Draft can still be informative when it comes to evaluating what we saw play out last fall.
Although nothing can change the results of this past fall, the NFL Draft each spring presents an opportunity to retroactively judge a conference’s overall talent according to NFL front offices and their opinions of draft-eligible prospects in each league.
Of course, it’s not a perfect encapsulation of conference-wide strength — that’s settled on the field. But when the SEC took over as college football’s most-dominant conference nationwide in the mid-aughts, the narratives coming out of the NFL Draft were a big reason why.
The SEC was regularly responsible for 20+ percent of the top 100 picks each draft. The ACC and Big Ten had a couple of outlier years in that neighborhood, but neither was close on a consistent basis. The other power conferences were even further away.
In the 2010s, the SEC’s draft production grew alongside its on-field dominance. From 2006 through 2022, there was only one season (2014) that didn’t feature at least 1 SEC program in the national title game. On draft weekend, the SEC continued to pace the other leagues, peaking with 39 of the first 100 draft picks in 2020.
Now, coming out of 2025, the on-field narrative has shifted in a significant way. The SEC has added bluebloods in Texas and Oklahoma in recent years, but the conference is no longer a mainstay in the championship game. The SEC is in the midst of a 3-year drought of appearing in the National Championship Game — its longest since 1999-2002.
There’s no shortage of theories or ideas as to why this is happening. Among them: NIL, the transfer portal, changes in priorities for high school recruits, the expanded CFP and, perhaps most-impactfully, the retirement of Nick Saban.
There’s no question that each of those factors has had an impact on the SEC’s decline in postseason results. But one thing hasn’t changed — the SEC is still the most talented league by a significant margin.
2026 NFL Draft results
First, let’s start with the most concerning news for the SEC: its performance in the first round. The SEC had just 7 first-round picks, which lagged behind the Big Ten (10) and was nearly matched by the ACC (6) and Big 12 (6).
This is a sharp dropoff for the SEC, who had a record-tying 15 first-rounders in 2025. However, it’s not unprecedented. The SEC also had 7 or fewer first-round picks in 2008, 2010 and 2015. More recently, it has had single-digit first-rounders in 2016, 2019 and 2023.
The more telling story on Day 1 was the Big Ten, which reached double-digit first-round picks for the second year in a row. The Big Ten didn’t have a single draft with 10+ first-rounders in the 21st century prior to 2025. Of course, this coincides with the Big Ten’s expansion, but this league has still been on the rise in recent years. From 2017-2023, the Big Ten had 7+ first-rounders in 5 of 7 drafts. It didn’t hit 7 first-round picks at all between 2007-2016.
The top-100
If you widen the scope to include the top 100 prospects (essentially the first 2 days of the draft) then you start to see the SEC’s depth show up.
In the top 100, the SEC produced 36 picks this year. That’s the 5th time in the last 7 years that the SEC has accounted for at least 30% of the top 100 in a draft (the SEC peaked with 39 of the top 100 in 2020).
Even with expansion, the Big Ten has not been able to replicate this level of depth and high-end talent. Since at least 2000, no other conference has produced 30+ picks in the top 100 of a single draft. The ACC’s high of 25 came in 2006. The Big Ten hit 29 this year, but its pre-expansion best was also 25. The Big 12’s high-water mark is 17 (2005). The Pac-12 got to 25 in 2015.
Here’s a chart showing the rolling averages of top-100 pick share in the CFP era for each of the power conferences:
What does this mean for the future?
It should be clear that college football’s high-end talent is congealing at the top of the sport. Some have argued that NIL allows for a smoothing of talent, pointing to the rise of programs like Indiana, Texas Tech and Miami.
But I’d argue the data shows the opposite. The barrier to entry to be an elite college football team has changed drastically in recent years, but it’s also higher than ever. There’s now more talent on fewer teams than at any other point in the scholarship-limit era.
That dynamic shows up clearly in the NFL Draft data. For 3 consecutive drafts, there have been 6 teams that produced 5 or more picks in the top 100. That didn’t happen a single time from 2000-23.
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A similar pattern shows up when looking at the entirety of the last 3 drafts. In 2024, there were 5 teams that produced 10+ draft picks. That dipped to 4 and 3 in 2025 and 2026, respectively, but each of those numbers is still higher than the total for any single draft from 2000-23. Only 3 times over that same span were multiple programs responsible for 10+ draft picks in a single year.
Reconciling Draft success with on-field shortcomings
Of course, it should be stated plainly that the SEC’s continued draft dominance isn’t nearly as important as winning (or even competing for) national championships. I hope nothing said above is interpreted as anything remotely close to a consolation prize for the SEC.
If anything, I think the recent NFL Draft data supports 3 conclusions:
- The SEC still has the most depth of any conference
- The SEC has been under-performing relative to its talent level over the past couple of years, particularly at the top of the league
- The best and richest teams in college football are increasingly responsible for a larger number of NFL Draft picks
The SEC’s depth does matter to some degree, although it may prove to be detrimental, especially as the 9-conference-game era begins in 2026. If teams in the SEC are closer together in terms of overall team strength, that introduces more variance into on-field results and could result in the league’s best teams not earning postseason opportunities.
An argument could also be made that the bottom of the SEC being more competitive will have trickle-down effects that impact even the bluebloods in this conference. Look no further than Vanderbilt, which poached 5-star quarterback Jared Curtis away from Georgia. Kentucky, led by first-year coach Will Stein, signed a top-10 transfer class for the 2026 season.
For the most part, the Big Ten doesn’t have to deal with that level of competition at the bottom of the league. For example, all 16 SEC teams are ranked in the top 42 of 247Sports’ overall recruiting rankings for the 2026 cycle (includes high school and transfers). Only 9 of the Big Ten’s 18 programs meet that criteria.
The SEC falling behind the Big Ten in public perception isn’t because of a talent problem, but the results of the last 3 years are impossible to ignore. If current trends continue over multiple cycles, the gap between the SEC and the Big Ten in Playoff results will look nothing like the gap in draft production.
For the SEC to get back to the top of the sport, it must find ways to channel its depth of talent into hyper-elite teams year-in and year-out. Finding a solution to that problem only figures to get tougher in 2026 and beyond as the SEC transitions to 9 conference games.
Spenser is a news editor for Saturday Down South and covers college football across all Saturday Football brands.
