The Mississippi Association of Community and Junior Colleges (MACJC) is quietly one of the best college football conferences no one’s heard of.

As given away by the name, the conference lays claim to the 14 community and junior colleges located in the state of Mississippi. It’s also laid claim to more than three dozen future SEC football stars just in the last five years alone.

Junior college transfers are becoming a bigger and bigger part of the FBS, and teams best-equipped to lure in the nation’s top talents with a bit of post-high school seasoning are often the teams best equipped to remain relevant at the Division I level.

The SEC has been beyond relevant in the FBS for much of its illustrious history, and as one could guess it’s also been as successful as any conference in the country as far as hauling in junior college talents is concerned.

Just in the last five recruiting cycles from 2011-15, the SEC’s 14 teams have signed 87 junior college transfers regarded among the top 50 in their class by the 247Sports industry composite rankings. That leads all other power conferences at the FBS level.

And among those 87 signees, 40 of them played their junior college ball in the MACJC. That’s right, 46 percent of the SEC’s best junior college signees all hail from one league, located in the otherwise unassuming state of Mississippi.

Auburn’s D’haquille Williams is a MACJC alum, as are Alabama’s D.J. Pettway and Jarran Reed. Those are just three examples among the dozens of players graduating from the MACJC to star in the SEC.

The league has truly become the junior college capital of the SEC. States like Kansas, California, Arizona, Texas and others all boast tremendous junior college leagues of their own, but when it comes to producing talent for the SEC specifically, they all lack what Mississippi is bringing to the table.

To be fair, regional affiliation plays a major role in the MACJC’s strong ties to the SEC. After all, two of Mississippi’s three FBS programs call the SEC home, as does LSU (located less than 100 miles from the South Mississippi border) and Vanderbilt (located less than 100 miles from the North Mississippi border).

Coaches in the SEC are able to form strong relationships with coaches in the MACJC, creating a pipeline with a proven track record of success for both the junior colleges and the SEC schools. Not to mention many of the stars of the MACJC hail from either Mississippi or Louisiana, two states known for their high school football talent.

And it’s worth noting much of the strength of the pipeline from the MACJC to the SEC is built upon the success of East Mississippi Community College (EMCC), which claims three of the last four NJCAA national titles. For example, Ole Miss quarterback Chad Kelly played for East Mississippi, leading it to a title just last season. And Kelly is not alone.

In fact, Kelly is one of 17 former EmCC Stars to advance to the SEC just in the last five years. Remember, the MACJC as a whole sent 87 players to the SEC in that time. A whopping 19 percent of them hail from the same one school.

Kelly is the most recent East Mississippi transfer to land in the SEC, but he’s hardly the first or the best player to do so. He’s actually replacing a former EMCC quarterback in Bo Wallace as the starter at Ole Miss this fall.

Mississippi State’s Denico Autry began his college career at East Mississippi and he now plays in the NFL. Kentucky’s Za’Darius Smith also began his career at EMCC and he’s projected to be a mid-round selection in this spring’s draft. Reed and Pettway are EMCC products as well.

Yet the MACJC’s other 13 programs also managed to produce 70 SEC talents in the same five-year span, which speaks to the depth of the league. As junior college conferences go, few, if any, are better than Mississippi’s. Luckily for the SEC, the MACJC lies right in its own backyard, and the SEC has taken advantage in a major way.

Mississippi’s junior colleges have become the capital of the SEC’s junior college recruiting territory. All that’s missing is the SEC flag.