Nick Saban is in denial about the Big Ten passing the SEC
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The Big Ten has surpassed the SEC as the top conference in college football by pretty much every metric possible… except when it comes to the approval of Nick Saban.
After generational dominance as the best league in the sport, the balance of power has flipped. The SEC won 13 of 17 national championships from 2006-2022 including a streak of seven consecutive titles from 2006-2012. However, with the advent of NIL and the development of powerhouse programs up north, the Big Ten has now won the last three championships from 2024-2026 with Michigan, Ohio State, and Indiana all lifting the crystal ball.
The SEC has centered its identity on its football dominance, and rightly so. But even the biggest supporters of the conference like Paul Finebaum have waved the white flag that it’s now the Big Ten on top of the college football mountain.
But not so for Nick Saban.
Of course, Saban was the architect for much of the SEC’s dominance through the 2000s with six national championships at Alabama and one more at LSU. And appearing from SEC media days on Thursday’s episode of Get Up, the ESPN College GameDay analyst sounded like he was clinging to the past. Instead of judging conference superiority by national championships, Saban tried to shift the goalposts and talk about how great the SEC’s depth is, refusing to say that it had been surpassed by the Big Ten.
Showing that conference allegiances don’t go away easily, he even referred to the conference as “we.”
“Whoever wins the National Championship doesn’t define who has the best conference.”
“I think the best conference gets defined by how many good teams you have from top to bottom.”
Nick Saban weighs in on the Big Ten surpassing the SEC
— Get Up (@GetUpESPN) July 23, 2026
“First of all, whoever wins the national championship doesn’t define who has the best conference. I think the best conference gets defined by how many good teams you have from top to bottom. And I think the SEC has a lot of good teams from top to bottom,” Saban said. “I do think the Big Ten has had three really, really good football teams. Michigan had a great team, beat us in overtime in the playoffs three years ago. Ohio State, Indiana, they had really, really good teams. We continued last year, we had five teams in the playoffs as an SEC conference, which says that there’s pretty good depth in this league. A couple other teams, Vanderbilt and Texas, could have got in. There’s a lot of good teams in the SEC.”
Nobody’s college football opinions should be more resepcted than Nick Saban. But to suggest that the Big Ten is solely winning national championships and getting lucky with one team the last few years conveniently ignores that the depth argument about the SEC also doesn’t hold up, at least at the top of the league. The Big Ten was 11-5 in bowl games last year, the SEC was 4-10. In fact, the Big Ten has a combined 8-2 record against the SEC in bowl games over the last two seasons and a 3-0 record in the College Football Playoff.
And let’s not kid ourselves, the SEC wasn’t touting the records of Ole Miss and Vanderbilt when they were racking up national championships as the true test of conference bragging rights.
It’s a sad day for the SEC if they want to lean on their unbeaten record in hypothetical matchups and the fact that Kentucky would be favored over Rutgers head-to-head in Las Vegas as the tentpoles for their superiority. At least for ESPN, they’re still winning the ratings war against the Big Ten in spite of their fortunes being flipped on the field.
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