O’Gara: Looking back at how bad we (the media) are at picking the SEC Championship winner

We are Rafael Furcal.

For those who don’t know baseball well, Furcal had a solid, 15-year MLB career wherein he made 3 All-Star teams with 3 different teams and he eventually won a World Series with the St. Louis Cardinals in 2011. He made tens of millions of dollars as a good, but not Hall of Fame player.

Oh, and he hit .281 in his career. You know, like us. The media.

In our history of predicting the SEC Championship winner, we’re 9-for-32, which is a career .281 average. Granted, we didn’t make anywhere close to tens of millions of dollars and the closest any of us have come to a World Series ring was from the press box.

If you think about it in Furcal terms, it doesn’t sound that bad. Shoot, Craig Biggio was a career .281 hitter and he’s in the Hall of Fame with that pine tar-caked batting helmet. If you think about it pretty much any other way, though, our track record isn’t great.

Full disclosure here, I’ve only been voting since 2018. I take no responsibility for the 1992 voting as a 2-year-old who hadn’t quite mastered the use of the common American toilet yet. I won’t even take the blame for the 11-year stretch from 1996-2006 wherein the media failed to accurately predict the SEC Championship winner every time. Some would say that’s actually more impressive than getting it right a couple of times.

(We’ve also never gotten the pick correct in 3 consecutive years, which is about all you need to know.)

I, however, will call it like it is. We’re not good at this, but I’m not sure it’s as easy as some assume in a conference that’s as talented and as deep as the SEC is.

Take last year, for example. Georgia entered 2023 riding consecutive national titles. Were we supposed to pick against the Dawgs? Apparently, we were supposed to pick an Alabama team that had questions galore at quarterback.

Speaking of that, 2023 was the first time since 2015 that Alabama wasn’t the preseason pick to win the SEC. And like in 2015, when the media got way too cute and picked Auburn to win the league — Alabama was somehow still the pick to win the division but Auburn got more votes to win the conference — the Tide won the SEC. Each of the last 4 times that Alabama wasn’t picked to win the SEC (2009, 2012, 2015 and 2013), it won the conference title.

OK, so then this should be easy, right? Just don’t pick against Alabama and everything will be fine. Eh, not so much.

Here are all the years in which the media picked Alabama to win an SEC title and it didn’t happen:

• 1993 — Eventual winner: Florida
• 2000 — Eventual winner: Florida
• 2010 — Eventual winner: Auburn
• 2011 — Eventual winner: LSU
• 2013 — Eventual winner: Auburn
• 2017 — Eventual winner: Georgia
• 2019 — Eventual winner: LSU
• 2022 — Eventual winner: Georgia

So of those 23 total whiffs on the SEC Championship winner pick, 8 of them came after Alabama was the preseason selection. Six of those misses happened in the Nick Saban era.

Of course, that’s the elephant in the room (pun intended). For the first time since 2006 — the final year of that aforementioned 11-year media picking drought — predicting an SEC winner won’t have a Saban factor to consider. For the first time, it won’t have a division factor to consider, either.

This is the first year of the SEC’s existence in which it’ll have a conference title game without divisions (TBD on what that tiebreaker system will be). Perhaps that’ll get us above Furcal levels of success? Or perhaps a 16-team SEC will mean the odds are even more against us getting this right.

I’d bet on the latter.

While I’ll always say that 2015 was the worst media display to date — Auburn finished 7th in the SEC West and became the first preseason SEC champ to not even finish in the top 5 in its division — it was somewhat common for a team to win a national title after it wasn’t picked to win the SEC:

• 1992 national champ — Alabama (Florida was the preseason SEC pick)
• 1996 national champ — Florida (Tennessee was the preseason SEC pick)
• 1998 national champ — Tennessee (Florida was the preseason SEC pick)
• 2003 national champ — LSU (Auburn was the preseason SEC pick)
• 2006 national champ — Florida (Auburn was the preseason SEC pick)
• 2009 national champ — Alabama (Florida was the preseason SEC pick)
• 2010 national champ — Auburn (Alabama was the preseason SEC pick)
• 2012 national champ — Alabama (LSU was the preseason SEC pick)
• 2015 national champ — Alabama (Auburn was the preseason SEC pick)
• 2019 national champ — LSU (Alabama was the preseason SEC pick)
• 2022 national champ — Georgia (Alabama was the preseason SEC pick)

That’s 11 instances in the last 32 years in which an SEC team won a national title after it wasn’t picked to win the conference.

In other words, take next week’s voting with a grain of salt in every way. I’m already wondering how my pick of Georgia, AKA the team with 39 consecutive regular season wins, will blow up in my face. On second thought, it’s really not that difficult to figure out if UGA is the media pick — not picking Alabama will mean a Tide SEC Championship. Obviously.

And if that happens? We’ll be fighting to get back to Furcal levels.

Connor O'Gara

Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.