Comparing and contrasting SEC vs Big Ten depth since conference expansion

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The Big Ten has won the College Football Playoff National Championship for three consecutive seasons. The Michigan Wolverines hoisted the trophy following the 2023 season, a team that lost to Michigan won the national title in 2024, and the Indiana Hoosiers capped off a magical season with a national championship in 2025.

A common refrain from SEC pundits is the SEC is still the superior conference because it’s deeper as a whole and, thus, is harder to get through the regular season unscathed. Is that a legitimate argument?

Determining conference depth is by nature somewhat subjective. The first thing we must do is choose a timeframe. The Big Ten has experienced significant growth in recent years. Following Penn State’s entrance in 1990, no new university joined until Nebraska in 2011. Rutgers and Maryland then joined in 2014, and UCLA, USC, Washington and Oregon followed suit in 2024.

As for the SEC, there was a 21-year gap between Arkansas and South Carolina joining the conference in 1991, and Texas A&M and Missouri joining in 2012. Only Oklahoma and Texas have joined since, doing so in 2024.

Let’s start by comparing head-to-head results of the current configurations of the conferences. Since 2024, the SEC is 5-2 against the Big Ten. Sadly, two of those SEC victories are against Michigan, as the Wolverines lost to Texas and Oklahoma in subsequent years. Other notable games include USC defeating LSU, and Alabama beating Wisconsin twice.

However, the script gets flipped when you include the CFP. The past two seasons, the Big Ten is 3-0 against the SEC, with Ohio State defeating both Tennessee and Texas in 2024, and Indiana defeating Alabama in 2025. If we ignore non-CFP bowl games, which are not hotly contested anymore, that leaves us at 5-5 between the two conferences the past two years.

Looking at SP+ helps differentiate the conferences a bit. Here is what the final SP+ rankings looked like after the 2024 season:

While the Big Ten was very top heavy in 2024, the middle of the conference was certainly dominated by the SEC. Specifically, the teams ranked sixth through 13th in the conference showed vast gaps between the SEC and Big Ten.

The Big Ten closed the gap in 2025, but there was still a bit of a disparity.

While the Big Ten owned the top three and was clearly the superior conference at the top, the SEC yet again dominated the mid-section. Its eighth best team (Alabama) was ranked No. 20 on SP+, while its 16th-best team was Kentucky at No. 65. The Big Ten had just four teams between No. 20 and 65. Notably, seven Big Ten teams graded out worse than the worst SEC team.

As unfortunate as it may sound, the SEC pundits have a legitimate argument for the conference being deeper in the past two years, but only if you believe in SP+ as a metric. Whether that has an impact on the SEC’s lack of national championships is certainly still up for debate.

Which conference do you think is the best? Let us know down in the comments section below.

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