The SEC has missed three straight championship games. When did that last happen?
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Under the bright lights of Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida, No. 1 Indiana and No. 3 Miami will compete for the championship of the College Football Playoff on Monday, Jan. 19.
The game will have no shortage of pageantry and stakes, from the pregame pyrotechnics to the musical performances, all of which will unfold with tens of millions of fans watching across the country, clinging to every second of the action. At the end of it all, the sport’s most coveted prize will be handed out, rewarding months and years of tireless work and preparation.
Missing from those festivities will be one particularly notable party.
For much of this century, the SEC has dominated college football and the discourse around it, racking up championships, littering the top 25 of the major national polls, stacking top-ranked recruiting classes and even showering unsuspecting stadiums with chants of the conference’s name: “S-E-C! S-E-C! S-E-C!”
As the league is so fond of saying, it just means more there.
Monday night’s matchup, however, will mark the third consecutive season the conference hasn’t had one of its members in the national title game. This rut is coming off of one of the more overwhelming runs for a conference in college football history, with SEC teams winning 13 of a possible 17 national championships between 2006 and 2022.
That absence has raised no shortage of questions about what has happened and, at least from fans of schools in other conferences, created a fair bit of schadenfreude.
How long has it been since the SEC has been shut out of the sport’s biggest stage for this long? Here’s a closer look at the SEC’s championship drought:
When did SEC last miss championship game for three straight years?
The SEC’s three-year championship game drought is the conference’s longest since its schools missed out on the title matchup four seasons in a row, from 1999-2002.
College football didn’t stage its first official national championship game until the 1998 season, with the advent of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), which pitted the two highest-ranked teams against each other.
The SEC’s relative struggles in the early 2000s didn’t last for long. After placing at least one team in only two of the first eight BCS championship games — the other being LSU in 2003 — an SEC team made the national title game in 16 of the next 17 seasons, beginning in 2006.
How many times has SEC not been in national championship?
Since college football instituted a national championship game during the 1998 season, this year marks the 10th time that an SEC team hasn’t made the title game, including the third year in a row. The SEC also had three seasons in which it fielded both championship game participants, in 2011 (Alabama vs. LSU), 2017 (Alabama vs. Georgia) and 2021 (Alabama vs. Georgia).
National championship games without SEC teams
Here’s a look at college football national championship games that didn’t include SEC teams:
- 1999: Florida State 46, Virginia Tech 29
- 2000: Oklahoma 13, Florida State 2
- 2001: Miami 37, Nebraska 14
- 2002: Ohio State 31, Miami 24 (OT)
- 2004: USC 55, Oklahoma 19
- 2005: Texas 41, USC 38
- 2014: Ohio State 42, Oregon 20
- 2023: Michigan 34, Washington 13
- 2024: Ohio State 34, Notre Dame 23
- 2025: Indiana vs. Miami
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: When did SEC last miss three straight national championship games?
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