MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — The Big Ten has won the past three national titles in football and is 4-0 against the SEC over the past three seasons in head-to-head College Football Playoff matchups, but SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said on Wednesday those metrics are a “pretty narrow band” and his league still “stands alone.”
“If you look at the entirety of our league, we are by far the most competitive, the strongest football league by far,” Sankey told reporters following the second full day of SEC spring meetings. “But you’re going to lose games when it’s close and competitive like that. So why have they surpassed us? It’s an oddball, it’s bounced a couple times the wrong way.”
When a reporter asked why the Big Ten has moved past the SEC in football performance in the CFP, Sankey didn’t bristle at the question but was armed with a response. He pointed out that Michigan beat Alabama 27-20 in overtime in the 2024 CFP semifinal at the Rose Bowl and quickly broke down Ohio State’s 28-14 CFP semifinal win against Texas in the Cotton Bowl.
He also recounted Miami’s thrilling win against Ole Miss this past season in the Fiesta Bowl, where the Rebels fell short after a last-second pass in the end zone fell incomplete.
“That wasn’t a hail Mary, that was an attempt to score a touchdown in the last play, and those, those are small margins between winning and losing,” he said, “and we prevailed on those small margins a number of times.”
The Big Ten has won three straight national titles for the second time since the AP Poll made its in 1936 (1940-42). Meanwhile, the SEC has not made a national championship game in three seasons, the conference’s longest streak since 1999-2002. According to ESPN Research, there had been at least one SEC team in 16 of 17 national championship games from the 2006 to 2022 seasons (2014 was the lone exception).
“I can assure you that everyone in this league is trying to figure out how to come up on the top end of that in the future,” Sankey said, “But I think from a big picture, the breadth, the depth of this league, this league stands alone. In fact, we saw metrics out of the college football playoff presentation where there’s no doubt we’re the strongest league. Now, there’s some segments of other leagues that are towards where we are, but not nearly the entirety of a conference like the Southeastern Conference. It’s a pretty special place.”
With less than 100 days to the start of the season, Indiana is coming off its first national title in program history and is currently tied for the third-shortest odds with Texas to repeat. Ohio State, the 2024 national title winner, is the favorite at DraftKings Sportsbook. Eight of the 10 teams with the shortest odds to win the national title come from either the Big Ten or SEC, with Notre Dame (second-shortest) and Miami (seventh-shortest) the exceptions.
