"2. If SEC hegemony continues, is it a bad thing? The league stands a solid chance of winning a seventh straight national championship, by far the longest streak for one conference in history. With dominance can come indifference in other parts of the country – do fans elsewhere stop caring quite as much about college football if it becomes too centralized in one region? Last year there was significant backlash to the all-SEC championship matchup of LSU and Alabama, an indication of national SEC fatigue. For the good of the sport it would probably be better if someone outside of Dixie wins the title this year – but some intrepid team needs to step up and actually do it."
The author brings up a good point and I agree with what he is trying to get across, however, I'm going to go in a different direction.....kind of.
One of the major aspects that college football tries to project is that every team should be on equal ground when it comes to competition and they accomplish that by setting up stiff rules that every team has to follow. Such as, rules that regulate recruiting and rules against paying players. The thing that college football doesn't seem to want to talk about that goes against this image of competition is the amount of money each school gets from their respective conference's TV deal. Look at it this way, Vanderbilt, a team that is a doormat in the SEC and has only won 8 games once since the 50's, gets more TV money than Florida State, a team that has won numerous National Championships and was a Top 5 team for 14 consecutive years at one point in the past two decades. How in the hell does that make sense? How are teams (like Vandy, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Mississippi) that are riding on the coattails of Alabama and LSU making more money than teams that actually compete year in and year out?
Somehow I feel like the money disparity between conference TV deals is going to be the unmaking of college football. When a crappy team in the SEC is making $5 to $10 million more per year than a great team in another conference over a span of 15 years (that's the usual length of TV contracts), that really adds up and can put teams in the other conferences at a real disadvantage. And this is why I think the SEC being "dominant" is a bad thing for college football (I put dominant in quotations because only a couple of the teams in the SEC are actually truly dominant and those top teams are allowing the rest of the conference to cash in on their excellence). That extra cash goes towards better facilities and better coaching which in turn brings in better recruits and when one conference is getting the cream of the crop of the players, college football as a whole is worse off. Sure, other schools around the country will still bring in great recruiting classes because of tradition and brand name, but the rest of those teams' conferences opponents won't.
However, the argument is that conference dominance is generally cyclical, but when SEC teams are making so much more than the rest of the country, it does create a backlash. Why do you think the All-SEC National Championship was the lowest rated BCS Championship in history? Because the rest of the country didn't want to watch a game which shouldn't have happened in the first place. And to add insult to injury, it looks like another All-SEC Championship might happen again this season. Hopefully, the SEC will get complacent and the rest of the country can knock them down a peg in the near future. But as long as the SEC continues to pull in that kind of cash, it will make it that much harder for people across the country to continue to tune in when only a handful of schools in one section of the country continue to win. In other words, college football might turn into NASCAR.
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| "Be careful college football, this might be your future." |
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