At 9 p.m. ET, there was no case to be made. Clay Travis couldn’t make it, nor could Paul Finebaum or any other SEC apologist.

At the time, saying the SEC had the best postseason would’ve been like trying to say that Tennessee was four plays away from a national title. The SEC was an underwhelming 2-5 in bowl games to that point. That was after South Carolina stormed back and beat Michigan for the Big Ten’s first postseason loss.

No, the SEC was not having a memorable postseason as of the closing minutes of the Rose Bowl. SEC teams lost to teams from the ACC (Wake Forest), B1G (Northwestern), Big 12 (Texas), an independent (Notre Dame) and even a Group of 5 team (UCF). The SEC haters were out in full force.

“How could the SEC have two Playoff teams after such a crappy bowl season?”

Perhaps those people went to bed early on Monday night. If they stayed up late, they were forced to watch the SEC win the postseason.

Yes, putting two teams in the national championship was the trump card for that argument. Alabama and Georgia accomplished history. Shoot, they already accomplished history just by giving a conference two Playoff teams for the first time. They just accomplished more history by making it an All-SEC national championship.

Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

You’ll notice that I said the SEC won the postseason, and not that the SEC was the best conference in 2017. Who was the best conference in America this year? I honestly don’t think there was one. I could make a legitimate argument for pretty much everyone except the Pac-12.

We tend to making sweeping generalizations about bowl games being the true test for how good a team is. In reality, there’s probably too much emphasis on bowl games and not enough on non-conference showdowns. But timing is everything in life. And for many, it’s easier to remember a New Year’s Day game than a mid-September showdown.

Let’s get back to the argument at hand because frankly, that’s the only one that matters right now.

How could the SEC have won the postseason when teams like Auburn and LSU laid eggs? Why wouldn’t that title go to the 7-1 B1G, which went 3-0 in New Year’s 6 bowls?

I mean, that’s pretty obvious, right? If you fail to have representation in the Playoff, you’re exempt. At 9 p.m. ET, the SEC actually had a better shot at claiming the postseason conference supremacy title than the B1G.

That’s not meant to be a shot at the B1G, which was a Michigan collapse away from a perfect postseason. Well, perfect from a record standpoint. Winning six games as the favorite when none of those games had national championship implications isn’t quite perfect.

The SEC obviously didn’t have a perfect postseason, either. Nobody did. Look at the bowl records of the Power 5 conferences:

  1. B1G, 7-1
  2. Big 12, 5-3
  3. SEC, 4-5 (of course it will be 5-6 at the end)
  4. ACC, 4-6
  5. Pac-12, 1-8

Oh, and the Big 12 was 0-1 in its New Year’s 6 bowls while the ACC was 0-2.

Meanwhile, the SEC won two Playoff games. One was against the Heisman Trophy winner, the other was against the No. 1 overall seed and defending champs. Sorry, but that outweighs any Auburn dud.

There’s no SEC bias in saying that the conference that put two teams in the national championship game won the postseason. It’s different than when Alabama and LSU faced off in the 2012 BCS National Championship. That, many argued, was why we needed the Playoff system.

Ironic it is that the SEC found a way to beat the new system. That might’ve added more ammo to the argument that the field needs to be expanded to eight. After all, UCF went 13-0 and beat Auburn, which beat both national title teams convincingly. For those people, the all-SEC national championship wasn’t as much about what the conference did as much as it was about what other conferences didn’t get to do.

But this current system is designed to decide it on the field. Georgia will play its 15th game of the season to try become the fifth different SEC team to win a national title in the past 12 years. Alabama will play in its 14th game of the season trying to earn its fifth national title in nine years. Either way, the SEC will claim its ninth national title in 12 years.

The SEC is used to winning the postseason. It’s just not used to winning it this soon.