What's wrong with SEC football? Nothing another natty won't fix

What in the world is wrong with the Southeastern Conference? Now, keep in mind this is a relative question and a relative issue. The reality is that those who love to use the "S-E-C!" chant and wave the barbecue-sauce-stained flag of their alma mater, they became a bit spoiled. That will happen when your conference wins 14 national championships in a century that is barely a quarter of the way through ... and it wins 13 in 17 years ... and when those national championships are scattered across five schools ... and when a not small percentage of those national championships were won by SEC schools defeating another SEC school ... and let's not even get into counting all of the Heisman trophies and first-round NFL draft picks from said conference. See? Spoiled rotten, and understandably so. Thus the particularly acute sharpness of the pain felt by a league that has not merely failed to win a national title over the last three seasons but has not even had a team make it to the championship game in that time. All while being forced to watch teams from the other Power 2 conference -- the Big Ten -- stand atop the stage hoisting the big, gold College Football Playoff trophy three years in a row, something it hadn't accomplished since 1942, and all three teams having curb-stomped an SEC team somewhere in that CFP bracket to get to the big game. Oh, and every time any SEC fan, player or coach has checked their social media timelines this summer, they've had to hear and re-hear Curt Cignetti calling them out. Not the boss at Ohio State or Michigan, but the head coach at I-N-D-I-A-N-A?! "That's not a lot of fun, right?" Missouri coach Eliah Drinkwitz said last month, laughing. "Because now it's not just, well, this legendary brand name program made their way back to the top, it's a program that has always struggled, and they are the best team in the country. Now, no matter where you coach, the question is, 'Well, what's your holdup, Coach?' Freaking Indiana did it!" So, cause of pain firmly established and understood, what about the panic? Is there an overreaction to the trio of January absences, or is there real reason for the land of "It Just Means More" to feel like it is losing ground? "I think that no one is certainly working any less hard than they were four years ago," Georgia coach Kirby Smart said with a chuckle. His Dawgs were the last SEC team to win it all, earning back-to-back rings in 2021 and '22. UGA missed the CFP in '23 after losing in the conference title game but made the first two 12-team fields -- and was bounced out of the Sugar Bowl both years. "The landscape of how we do business has certainly changed over those three years. Hell, it seems to change every week. I think programs studied the way that we were doing things and now we are all studying the way that they do it. It's not just raising money and spending money. It's how do you raise and how smart are you with how you spend it." Ah yes, money. For decades, the cash flow of the SEC was obvious and envied, bolstered by historic media rights deals and those underwriting boosters in school-color blazers and their names on football buildings. But the NIL era has leveled that financial playing field, perhaps not so much in terms of facilities and flash, but most definitely when it comes to recruiting and retaining talent. The financial firewalls that used to seal off the southeastern high school football pipeline aren't what they used to be. Where a handful of those boosters used to be enough to foot the bill, the Big Ten's big-city backers have been big-time woken up. Last December we heard as much about the size and location of Indiana's massive alumni base as we did about the abilities of Fernando Mendoza. And speaking of Mendoza, the quick-fix lure of the transfer portal has become a traffic jam of players who five years ago would have happily resided with the reserves at an Alabama or Georgia. Why? Because that patience came with the promise of winning rings while waiting for their name to be called, and when that promotion took place, it was after months and months of pro-style preparation. "Now kids want to play. That's not new. Everyone wants to play. But now you don't have to sit and wait if you don't want to," said Vanderbilt's Clark Lea, who in the last three seasons has benefited more than most from all of that roster movement. "It's pretty simple. You take top-tier talent and spread it around more, then what happens? More talented teams everywhere. The idea of an easy weekend is becoming more difficult to find on your schedule." That has been and will always be the case in the SEC. At the same time it has become more difficult to keep talent in the building, the nine-game conference schedule has arrived. Judging from the reaction of all 16 head coaches, that already seems to have fallen into the category of "seemed like a good idea at the time." "I am not great at math," Texas A&M's Mike Elko confessed, "but I do know that means there will be nine more losses that have to go somewhere." (It's actually 16 more losses -- one for every extra conference game -- but who's counting.) There is also the issue of these very coaches giving us these quotes. Turnover in the SEC is a time-honored tradition. But these days have been more upheaval-y than most. There are five new head coaches in the conference, six if you include Lane Kiffin's move from Ole Miss to LSU. The longest tenured is Smart, entering his 11th season at Georgia. Next on the list is Drinkwitz, who is in his sixth year at Mizzou. Nick Saban's retirement, now three years ago, was always going to create some destabilization in Tuscaloosa, but considering the number of SEC coaches who still consider him a mentor, the effect of being in the post-GOAT era has reached far beyond the field that bears his name. It's no secret that Saban hung up his headset when he did because of the changing landscape you've just been reading about. However, he also believes that system, for those who choose to stay in it, isn't a death sentence for the SEC as we knew it. "The perception of the health of the conference is always going to be national championships. That's a good problem to have because it's a measuring stick that we as a league created," the seven-time national champ said. "So how do you change that perception? It sounds pretty simple, but we all know it's not. You have to win the big games." During the summer of 2013, then-ACC commissioner John Swofford was cornered by reporters at his conference's media days. He was flooded with questions about the imminent collapse of the conference, how the Big East was coming for them and how there was no way the old league could survive. Swofford, always the calmest guy in the room, said to that group, "We have not taken care of our business in our rivalry games, in bowl games and on the biggest stages. If we do that this year, you guys will stop asking me about this, trust me." That very year, Florida State defeated Auburn in the BCS national championship game, Jameis Winston won the Heisman Trophy, Big East schools moved to the ACC and not the other way around, and Swofford negotiated a media rights deal that, though outdated now, was groundbreaking when it was signed. "Perception as reality is certainly the truth to a lot of people who love this conference," said SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, who is admittedly not having much fun surfing the current landscape of collegiate athletics, let alone the talk about his conference's football "struggles." "In the end, more than financials or spreadsheets or whatever other kind of numbers and charts you want to produce, performance under the brightest lights, that's how the public will measure your strength." The time has come to turn those lights back on. Whatever happens next, there's no greater reality than that.