The SEC continued their incredible undefeated streak in hypothetical games on Wednesday’s edition of The Pat McAfee Show thanks to former Alabama coach and current ESPN analyst Nick Saban.
The SEC may not be shining on the football field or in the College Football Playoff rankings thanks to multiple top ranked teams experiencing devastating upsets for their postseason hopes last weekend. But that isn’t stopping the conference’s supporters or media members for continuing to position them as world beaters in hypothetical situations.
The latest example was Saban’s appearance with McAfee. Saban was talking about the inequality of the conferences and the belief that the SEC’s quality and depth harms the league when it comes to the playoff because it’s just so unbelievably burdensome. He then used Ole Miss and the Big 12 to try to prove his point.
“The subjective part of this that you can never fix is the conferences are not equal,” said Saban. “They are not equal in depth of good teams. Nor are they equal in the quality of the best teams. To give you an example, let’s just take Ole Miss so I just stay away from this Alabama thing. So if Ole Miss played in the Big 12, what would their record be? That’s the kind of subjective issues that we have in college football that is never going to change. Unless we put the best 40 teams in college football and put them in a league, very similar to the 32 teams that are in the NFL.”
Unfortunately for Nick Saban and SEC fans, the Big 12 brought the receipts that maybe Ole Miss wouldn’t have the cakewalk in the league that they would expect.
Undefeated in Hypothetical Games https://t.co/kVbkzmDnd5 pic.twitter.com/4lznb1zpXe
— Big 12 Conference (@Big12Conference) November 27, 2024
How would Ole Miss do in the Big 12? Well, they are 9-8 against the conference all time and losers of three out of five games. In fact, since 2020, the Big 12 as a whole is 11-8 against the SEC and 6-3 in bowl games. So who is the real super-conference here?
These constant hypotheticals are always so strange because we have a very real life example of how top teams would do in other conferences thanks to conference realignment this year. If the SEC was so much more difficult than the Big 12… why is Texas at the top of the league in their very first year? Why did a down Oklahoma team smash Alabama to pieces in their very first year?
Step back a little bit further in history and you can see a mid-level Big 12 program like Missouri make it to the SEC Championship Game in two of their first three seasons in the league. Those weren’t hypotheticals, those actually happened! For real life!
Yes, the SEC was the dominant force in college football for a long time, largely thanks to Nick Saban and Alabama. But that doesn’t mean it’s still that way in college football in 2024. The world will continue to spin on its axis if somehow four SEC teams don’t qualify for the first expanded playoff. One of these days, maybe fantasy will catch up to reality.
