𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

MOBILE, Ala. — Drew Stevens was an SEC guy. Born and raised in SEC territory — North Augusta, S.C. — Stevens was a South Carolina fan, and among the many sure of the football superiority of the It Just Means More league.

Then Stevens’ own football career took him north. And things turned.

Stevens, Iowa’s kicker the past four years, became a proponent of the Big Ten, which put him at odds with his younger brother Jack, who was still an SEC guy.

“My first two years of college, especially, we’d go at it. Like really get into it about what was the better conference,” Drew Stevens said. “It’s a lot easier to argue it right now.”

Stevens said this back in the heart of SEC country: Mobile, Ala., where he and other NFL Draft prospects participated in last week’s Senior Bowl. Since the season ended — a third straight without an SEC team in the national championship game — the state of the SEC has been well-discussed among fans, media, coaches and administrators.

But what about the players? They have opinions too. And in the transfer portal era, many have played in multiple conferences. Last week, The Athletic spoke to players, who in many cases reinforced the reasons offered up for the SEC’s slip. And while many talked of parity, there was still a bit of that old-fashioned SEC bravado.

“People are still trying to water down the SEC, trying to say that they’re not the best. But if they’re continuously trying to attack us, there’s a reason,” LSU quarterback Garrett Nussmeier said. “The SEC is the greatest league in college football.”

Conference depth

The overall rigor of the conference is where Nussmeier — who spent his entire career at LSU — pinned his argument.

“Sure, you could just pull up head-to-head records, but it’s not about that,” Nussmeier said. “It’s about you’re playing the best every single week in a 12-game season. There is no off week.”

One key metric backs that up: SP+, the formula devised by ESPN’s Bill Connelly, had the lowest SEC team (Kentucky) at No. 67, ahead of seven Big Ten teams, six ACC teams and five Big 12 teams.

Nate Boerkircher, a tight end who played four years at Nebraska before spending last year at Texas A&M, said both the Big Ten and SEC were great leagues, but the latter has more good teams. Boerkircher’s Aggies had perhaps the easiest conference schedule last season, but had to rally for a 10-point win over South Carolina, only beat Arkansas by 3, and topped Auburn by 6.

“The SEC is top to bottom probably the most talented league there is. Most draft picks, most athletes,” Boerkircher said. “The Big Ten, you see some good teams too. I think week in and week out you’re going to be battling more in the SEC.”

That was a theory posited by multiple SEC players, that their teams beat each other up during the regular season, which hurts them come the postseason, which is now longer. And going to a nine-game conference schedule next year will only exacerbate that.

Miami’s win over Ole Miss left the SEC with a 1-3 record in this year’s CFP against teams from outside its conference. (Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)

But Miami center James Brockermeyer, who spent his first three seasons at Alabama, painted it as less a conference-wide issue than team-specific. Miami built itself around a “physical brand of football,” as Brockermeyer put it, and while it stumbled twice during the ACC season (losing to Louisville and SMU, each of which finished in the Top 25), it then beat two SEC teams (Texas A&M and Ole Miss) along with Ohio State on the way to the national championship game.

“SEC teams do definitely have a lot of significant depth that other teams in the country don’t,” Brockemeyer said. “I mean, I was at Alabama for three and a half years. So I can speak to that, that there were a lot of really good players who weren’t on the field there playing. But I think at Miami this year we also had a lot of depth.”

Miami, of course, spent plenty of money to establish that depth. Which gets to what players also agreed was a huge factor.

NIL and the portal

Receiver Caleb Douglas symbolizes the two most frequently cited reasons for the SEC’s slippage: inability to stow players on the bench and being outspent by others. Douglas spent his first two years at Florida, where he never had more than 175 receiving yards, then transferred to Texas Tech, where he had 1,723 receiving yards in two years and was a key part of a College Football Playoff team.

“You can tell that donor at Texas Tech got his money’s worth,” cracked Diego Pavia, the Vanderbilt quarterback, who was impressed throwing to Douglas last week in Mobile.

Texas Tech turned heads with its portal spending last year, but the strategy brought a Big 12 title to Lubbock. The Red Raiders were one-and-done in the Playoff, but the more teams like them spend, the harder it gets for the SEC to hoard talent.

“There’s parity everywhere,” Douglas said. “There’s no specific conference that’s good. Everybody’s good everywhere now — especially with NIL.”

The draft may be an example of that. It has usually been dominated by the SEC, even after the 2023 and 2024 seasons. But it’s not quite a slam dunk this time: In The Athletic’s most recent mock draft, no player from the SEC is projected to go in the top nine picks. The SEC does still have 12 projected in the first round, more than the Big Ten, while each are projected to have 10 in the second round.

Still buried within that is the SEC’s depth argument: Thirteen different SEC teams have at least one player projected in those two rounds, compared to nine for the Big Ten. Though the Senior Bowl isn’t the best measure, because many high-end players don’t attend, for what it’s worth the SEC had the most participants, with 44 from 15 schools, while the Big Ten had 29 from 13 schools.

From Pavia’s standpoint, this era will spread talent around not only the country, but the SEC.

“They’ll forever have talented players at Alabama, just like LSU and A&M and all these schools that have money,” Pavia said. “But also every team in the SEC. It’s a level playing field now.”

Between the lines, coaching

For SEC fans, one jarring image of the last few playoffs has been opposing teams pushing theirs around at the line of scrimmage: Indiana over Alabama this past year, Notre Dame over Georgia last year. And yet when players were asked what the difference was between the SEC and everyone else, they kept coming back to the trenches.

“The O-line and D-line might be a little bigger in the SEC,” said Baylor QB Sawyer Robertson, who started his career at Mississippi State. “I thought the skill positions were pretty similar.”

Brockermeyer, the Miami center who played three years at Alabama, agreed with the idea the SEC was better along the lines in general. Teams like Miami were able to beat them by building themselves the same way.

“I don’t think that us beating those teams says the SEC is a bad conference,” Brockermeyer said. “I think it shows more about what we were able to do as a team at Miami this year, that we were able to have success playing a physical brand of football.”

There’s another theory, put forth by Stevens, the Iowa kicker.

“I think the coaching’s better in the Big Ten, to be honest,” Stevens said. “The talent is more dispersed now. I still think the SEC in terms of ratings has better, maybe, athletes. But I think at least the overall football is better in the Big Ten.”

Oklahoma’s September win over Michigan was seen as a big early-season result for the SEC at the time. (Stacy Revere / Getty Images)

Real or not?

The SEC had the best nonconference record during the regular season: 12-6 against power conference teams, including 2-1 against the Big Ten. (Oklahoma beat Michigan and Alabama beat Wisconsin, while Texas lost at Ohio State.) The Big Ten was only 5-7 against power-conference opponents.

But the postseason set the narrative.

“I don’t think the SEC needs to change,” said Boerkircher, the Texas A&M tight end who played four years at Nebraska. “There’s probably ups and downs. It’s been a down stretch in the postseason. … But one or two plays in a lot of those SEC games in the playoffs change, and it’s a completely different outcome. So I think you’ll see different results every year, and you’ll see SEC teams rise to the top more of the time.”

Indiana tailback Kaelon Black, fresh off the national championship, bristled at the notion that his team was simply the product of the change in college football. That’s not giving enough credit to coach Curt Cignetti and the Hoosiers, Black said.

“I would say its just we were a special team,” Black said. “We are a veteran team, but there are other veteran teams out there that didn’t do the same things we did. I also feel like we were committed to the process. There are a lot of people who are saying we’re so old, and we’re this and that, but I feel like our hard work in the offseason triumphed over everything.”

Still, Indiana was the third different Big Ten team in three years to win the title, and all in the NIL and transfer portal era. Then again, what if much of the narrative could have been changed by the last SEC team to win it all: Georgia?

Back in 2023, Georgia only lost one game — the SEC championship — but it knocked them out of the Playoff, the last year it was only four teams. If it had been a 12-team Playoff, who knows what would have happened. A year later, Georgia was a more flawed team and was beaten soundly by Notre Dame in the CFP quarterfinals. But this past year the Bulldogs, 12-1 entering the CFP, were knocked out in the final minute by Ole Miss, which then lost in the final minute to Miami, which then took Indiana to the wire in the championship.

“That’s college football. There’s a great parity there now that wasn’t there five years ago,” Georgia punter Brett Thorson said last week. “I definitely look at that ’23 season as one that stings, and one that we think we could’ve won. But again, when it’s decided by a committee, you’ve got to win the games. If we win, we control it. It hurts when you look back on it, it’s always a woulda-coulda-shoulda. Same again this year. It wasn’t our best day. And it hurts when it’s not your best day.

“It always hurts. But I don’t think that speaks on the SEC. It’s just college football. There’s good teams everywhere. It’s their day.”