A League of Their Own – The B1G Claims Rights Over the SEC

Posted on by

So here’s a lazy Saturday question for you – are you a fan of the conference as well as the team?

With the bowl season, the Yankees are claiming to be the best conference in college football, propped up by a Michigan National Championship* which involved going through Alabama instead of Georgia in 2023 and results from games versus the SEC.

Mind you, Alabama versus Michigan featured one team not wanting to be there and another wanting credibility, along with Jalen Milroe doing Jalen Milroe things. Carolina was without their best defensive player (opted out for NFL) and their RB1. USC beat TAMU which was doing TAMU things, and Tennessee should’ve never been in the playoffs, anyway, and ran up against a buzzsaw in Ohio state without their best running back.

So it goes.

This season was more about scheduling imbalances and making metrics look better or worse from flawed systems (how Mizzou was even in the top 25 is beyond me). Indiana, Penn State, Tennessee, Notre Dame…and many more, all benefited from soft schedules and the ranking process that ensued.

So it goes. It won’t be better next season, either, so get used to it.

But an SEC fan? I never relished in any other SEC team doing well elsewhere. I couldn’t care less. I love watching Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, Carolina, Auburn, Florida all lose. Anywhere to anyone. All those national championships that went to Tuscaloosa or Gainesville or Baton Rouge? I never gained joy or pride in any of that.

I guess conference pride is what you get when your team sucks and you’ve got nothing to do but root for other teams to beat other conferences. I don’t care what anyone says, save for tOSU and Michigan’s cheated season, the B1G has been laughably bad for years and didn’t get better until NIL and blue blood money and Committee bias made them “better””.

How about you? Does the conference flag warm your heart?

22 thoughts on “A League of Their Own – The B1G Claims Rights Over the SEC”

  1. Screw the conference flag. The suits in Birmingham and their money-grubbing lackey presidents and ADs cheapened all of that with expansion and realignment. The “eastern” part of SEC doesn’t exist anymore. Other than money, Georgia, South Carolina and Florida, in particular, have as much in common with the ACC now (not saying we should jump). The fans of other schools (cough, cough … Alabama, Tennessee, Florida … cough, cough) make me hate the other members more.

    • I am very open to the SEC East plus Auburn minus Mizzou forming a new conference with the southern ACC if they can figure out way to get more revenue to the schools with fewer slices in the pie. Vandy and Wake would sadly go the way of Tulane.

      Mega conferences have existed before, and Texas breaks up every conference they join, so it isn’t impossible.

  2. Nobody I know would unblushingly/unironically claim to be an SEC fan. The SEC fan is a lazy fiction created by ESPN b/c it owns the SEC Network. Not to put too fine a point on it, fuck those Florida, Auburn, Tennessee, South Carolina, Bama, and Texas motherfuckers, in that order. I hope Ohio State drops half a hundred on the Longhorns at Jerry World.

  3. Oh, yeah, and anybody claiming that Michigan would have won the SEC is a mush-brained troll. Mush-brained trolling is Barstool’s MO, so…very on-brand. The only reason Barstoolers don’t wear dunce caps is that they can’t figure out how to put ’em on.

  4. I think a little reset every now and then keeps our CFB fans to the north and west interested. When was the last time we really heard this “SEC is done/not dominant” refrain? 2016/18 Clemson natties? 2014 anOSU? 2013 Jimbo FSU?

  5. Eh, SEC is down this year and that’s okay. It had to happen eventually. But we still produce the best players so this is just a blip.

    I don’t pull for the SEC but conference perception certainly helps us.

    • Understanding $ec football drive$ the motor, i$ or has the $ec become or welcomed the tran$ition to a hoops conference….GO DAWGS!!

  6. Conference fandom is inversely proportional to your favorite team’s record.

  7. I used to pull for the SEC. Back in 04 Auburn didn’t make the BCS CG which many oppsoing fan bases may have viewed as amusing. However, UGA was in position to win it all ’05 and would likely not make the BCS CG with a perfect reccord as well.

    The realization the perception of the SEC mattered when invites to the BCS CG went out was solidified with those 2 years.

    Enter Bama dominance and a 4 team playoff now 12, my loyalty is fading. I was pulling for Beamer against Bielema but was not near as emotional. Bama getting beat was amusing. I was glad to see Ole Miss win as like their fan base better and Ole Miss deserved conversation of getting in the playoff not Bama.

    I still hate most Big10 fan bases more than I hate the overwheliming majority of SEC fan bases. Bama and Texas I hate those two. I don’t see myself turning on the remaining playoff just as I didn’t watch the 4 team playoff last year.

  8. I wish every SEC school not named UGA and maybe Vandy, just because, would lose every week. Don’t think anybody is beating Ohio State in the playoffs. Only team that I beleive has a chance is Texas and I think that’s unlikely. I’m still not impressed with ND as much as dissapointed with the UGA display on Thursday but it is fitting for the season. It’s embarrasing to lose to ND, ever!!!!

  9. I want the conference to succeed in the meta, but I don’t root for our rivals. I see it as good for the conference’s perception and power if they win, and good for me if they lose. If everyone else in the conference loses all the time, that hurts UGA in the long run. Kinda like how Tech sucking is worse for UGA in the macro, even if it is quite enjoyable in the micro.

    Getting rid of divisions sucks. It makes conference affiliation much less meaningful. We have nothing in common with Texas or Oklahoma, and we are at the mercy of the SEC scheduling lottery to see how screwed we are going to be each year. We still haven’t played at Texas A&M, and they’ve been conference members over a decade. We don’t play South Carolina at all after they tried to make that a rivalry for thirty years. It just doesn’t make sense any more.

    The backlash is the end result of the alliance. The SEC won a lot for a long time, so everyone banded together against the SEC. They forget that the Big 10 has taken teams from the ACC, Big East, PAC 12, Big 8, and Big 12, resulting in catastrophic reorganization in multiple conferences. Yet, somehow, the SEC is the bad guy. Let them hate. It’s the same story, just a different verse.

    • The root of their dislike of the SEC isn’t the winning on the field or SEC expansion, it is that if that they hear a southern accent they view it as a uneducated, inbred, hick despite reading our writers, listening to our music, and enjoying our weather. The view much of the nation had on the south is a reason why much of the south took joy in beating them. The SEC vs the world attitude was furthered by SEC teams not getting recognition as national champs or a chance to prove it on the field due to media bias remember the media wanted a Michigan Ohio State rematch for the BCS CG.

      • Much good insight and truth spoken there, Otto. Most years the SEC dominates during bowl season…but you never hear proclamations that the BIG is inferior to the SEC even though it has been and will continue to be.
        BTW…ND’s QB is from Alabama, is he not? If Northern teams are competing better against southern teams it’s because they are paying southern kids to come play for them.

  11. I’ll go on record here that I’m pulling for Texas to win it all. One, my wife is a Longhorn so that supports domestic tranquility. But also, if we can’t win it, I wouldn’t mind having a national champion with two losses, both to us.

  13. First, stop using twitter. Move to Bluesky like the rest of the world is doing.

    Same post, on Bluesky:

    https://bsky.app/profile/brettmcmurphy.bsky.social/post/3leshis24zk23

    My reply to Brett:
    https://bsky.app/profile/professorhartman.com/post/3leshtht5fk2w

    “Lifetime Georgia fan and UGA law alum. I hope Texas loses.

    I was giddy when Tenn lost.

    How does that fit your narrative?

    The media’s belief we root for our conference recruiting foes is about as brain dead as most of their takes.”

    And as I said to a moronic Iowa fan in the replies:

    “There are no “SEC fans.” Look at all the replies to his post. Being a rabid “SEC fan” died with the idiotic 2 team BCS when you had to desperately fight for conference respect to avoid getting douched on and left out (like undefeated Auburn in, 2004ish).”

    I don’t know how old most folks here are, but there WAS a time where we kinda-sorta had to root for the SEC.

    The bad old days of the BCS and 2 team championship selection. Believe it or not, the SEC used to get fucked over back then and it took us rattling off a zillion titles to finally fix that.

    But once we went to a 4 team playoff, that necessity ended because we would always get at least 1 team in, and that 1 team would probably win it all.

    • The irony is, if somehow Texas wins it all, what happens to this stupid narrative the media is pushing?

      How much more often do we need to win the title for them to stop treating a SINGLE year we don’t win as a blip rather than a seismic shift.

Comments are closed.