The SEC is losing its collective mind, and I’m jealous

The SEC is losing its collective mind, and I’m jealous

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The SEC is losing its collective mind, and I’m jealous
SEC spring meetings in Destin, Fla. in 2019 Destin2019

Is it weird that I feel…left out?

The SEC is going through it right now.

It’s SEC spring meetings, and just headline after headline has you wondering if we’re not watching a crack-up happen in real time.

There’s Jon Sumrall, formerly of Tulane and Florida simultaneously, Tulane before that, and now just Florida, talking about how trying to do both jobs was “The dumbest thing I’ve ever done in my life.” There’s Steve Sarkisian, latest disappointment at Texas, saying that all you needed to do to get a degree at Ole Miss was take “basket weaving”.

And, since we’re on the subject of Ole Miss, there’s LSU head coach Lane Kiffin, as ever, tweeting and talking through it, having tried to make excuses for his decision to leave Oxford ahead of the College Football Playoff by calling Ole Miss racist (true, just not, y’know, convincing as an excuse), getting lined up for sanction by the SEC for those comments, and doubling down by saying he’d have won the national title had he been allowed to coach Ole Miss in the CFP.

It’s a delightful shitshow, and it’s playing out not just at the coaches’ podium but in the administrators’ back rooms, too.

Most dire? The death of Chickenshit Saturday.

Yes, in moving to a nine-game conference schedule, the Southeastern Conference has done away with the fiction that their eight-game schedule was so grueling, they needed to play the best the Southern Conference and Ohio Valley had to offer on the penultimate weekend of the season, deep in the heart of November.

It’s absolutely a reality, as SEC commissioner Greg Sankey notes, that late November non-conference games are unworkable with a schedule where teams like South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida already play non-conference rivalry games and you’ve got to fit in that ninth conference game.

And it’s also a sign the SEC is finally playing by everyone else’s rules.

Whether it’s the leveled player payment field in NIL revenue and the potential for revenue-sharing, the rise of the Big Ten in the College Football Playoff, or the shifting media rights market, the aw-shucks smirks of Mike Slive and Greg Sankey just aren’t going to get it anymore. There’s no Saban-era Alabama riding in to save you, either—no conference titan for all the teat-sucklers of the Deep South to latch onto in the name of conference pride.

Things are so dire that the president of the University of Georgia wants you to know he isn’t outright talking secession from the NCAA…but, y’know, there’s gotta be federal regulation of college football now that the South—excuse me, the SEC—is losing. And if there’s not? Well, maybe a little secession. As a treat. They’re losing on the tield, and they’re losing the debate over media rights if the College Football Playoff went to 24 teams, as the Big Ten is demanding (which, you’ve gotta hand it to the SEC…it is a bad idea).

And what we’re seeing in Destin are the death rattles of a conference getting passed by.

If I were to be reading this as 26-year-old me, hungover* from a night of grad school drinking, I would be going in hard on the idea that the SEC is running scaaaaared, Pawwwwwwl. They see how anticompetitive their model has been down the stretch and realize a need to jam their product later in the year ahead of the College Football Playoff. Spicy takes would abound. College football matters, goddamnit.
* Yes, on Wednesday. Tuesday was $2 Wisco taps and $5 large one-toppings at Papa John’s and man, you learn how far $20 gets you.

The Big Ten has won the arms race. Thanks in no small part to the dominance of the West Coast additions, the conference currently (all 2025-26 unless noted) holds the national titles in…

  • Women’s golf (2025, Northwestern)
  • Field hockey (Northwestern)
  • Men’s water polo (UCLA)
  • Men’s soccer (Washington)
  • Football (Indiana)
  • Men’s wrestling (Penn State)
  • Women’s hockey (wisconsin, technically WCHA)
  • Women’s basketball (UCLA)
  • Men’s basketball (Michigan)
  • Women’s water polo (USC)
  • Women’s beach volleyball (UCLA)
  • Women’s lacrosse (Northwestern)

So why do I feel nothing?

This isn’t actually a tough introspective question. It’s because I don’t turn on the TV to watch the conference.

It’s not about the revenue. I like my affinity for Northwestern, full stop. The fun of college sports is then getting to shit-talk all the other ridiculous bullshit that we accept as a normal part of this deal: Pat Fitzgerald calling RPO “the purest form of communism”. PJ Fleck getting a face lift and praying we wouldn’t notice. Jim Harbaugh being a Catholic cryptofascist while calling chicken a nervous meat. Nebraska football under anyone not named Matt Rhule, Brian Ferentz failing upward while perpetuating that casual Iowa racism of a septuagenarian head coach in pleated Dockers.

So while the things that the SEC is fighting about range from sad (Sumrall) to tone-deaf (Sarkisian) to laughably stupid (Kiffin), and it is at least amusing to see Southerners reckoning with a playing field leveled out to something approaching fair…

…damn if I don’t want to see Bret Bielema call out Curt Cignetti’s hair dye. Give me David Braun making an off-handed comment about how his wife thinks Mary Ferentz’s cookies were a little dry. Let’s hear whoever the UCLA coach is—because honestly, who gives a shit—sparking some life into that rivalry by saying the only thing drier than Lincoln Riley’s brisket is his wife.

Jesus, I see what you’ve done for other conferences, and I want that for me.

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