If you go see Passenger in concert, I’ll bet you would hear “Let Her Go” twice. Once to open the show and once to close it. It’s the only hit Passenger has. It’s what people expect to hear.
Danny Kannell is in the same boat. He’s ready to play his one hit “no, actually the SEC sucks” at the drop of a hat. This time of year is when he gets the most out of it too. Like Darlene Love, you can listen any time, but come the Christmas season is what they were built for!
Kannell isn’t alone, especially not this year. The SEC has taken a lot of flack for its performance in the postseason. A lot of it is deserved. After all, two of the conference’s four wins came in games featuring two SEC teams.
Some of it is residual reaction too. Kannell, Brady Quinn, and others that earn a paycheck by whining about Alabama not being very good anymore are quick to celebrate any victory over Alabama as a huge deal for the winning team.
Fan is short for fanatic, so our reactions and analysis are usually tinged with at least a little emotion. That’s undeniably what is happening when it comes to the narrative about the SEC this season. As a guy that went to an SEC school and grew up in the footprint, I feel compelled to defend the conference where I can. Like I said, a lot of the criticism in 2025 was earned, but a lot more of it felt like performative ignorance.
SEC! SEC! SEC!
In the spirit of defending the conference where I can, let’s address this idea that fans of every team in the conference claim the success of any other team in the conference as their own. That, simply put, is a load of horse shit.
I went to the University of Alabama. Any success Auburn, Florida, Georgia, LSU, Ole Miss, or Tennessee experience is physically painful for me. I expect fans of those schools would say the same thing about any success Alabama experiences. The only people shouting “SEC! SEC! SEC!” are people that root for Kentucky or Mississippi State or South Carolina, and come on. Why do we want to ruin their good time? They have nothing else to celebrate!
The flip side to this is that in insisting that this kind of fan exists in the SEC, fans of other conferences have turned into that very thing themselves. While I grew up in Alabama, I now live in North Carolina. Do you know how many Tar Heel, Wolfpack, and Cavalier fans I know that celebrated Clemson’s national championships as their own? Do you know how many fans of those schools beat their chest when Florida State ran through Alabama in week 1?
It’s no different in the Big Ten. The same Ohio State fans that scoffed at being compared to Indiana all year turned their Wednesday night tears into feelings of superiority on Thursday when Oregon and Indiana dismantled Texas Tech and Alabama respectively.
And then, of course, there are Notre Dame fans – a group I like to call undercover cops, because the second someone else is having fun, they will reveal themselves to tell those people to knock it off. No matter what happens in this postseason, it somehow all proves that Notre Dame deserves to be named the national champion without playing a down.
This is the propaganda business
ESPN catches a lot of heat for doing SEC propaganda. It’s perfectly fair criticism. I began to notice last year just how shameless Joe Tessitore in particular has become in the booth.
But the accusations of SECSPN don’t come with much thought other than “hEy, WhY iS kIrK hErBsTrEiT sAyInG tExAs Is GoOd WhEn ThEy ArEn’T?”
The SEC touting at ESPN is about business. Disney pays the conference a lot of money to carry all of its games in every sport. It has a vested interest in making you feel like you need to watch those games. That’s marketing. It is a pretty basic business principle.
How is it different from what FOX does with the Big Ten? Well, ESPN is doing conference propaganda. FOX is doing specifically Ohio State and Michigan propaganda and throwing an occasional bone to Penn State and Oregon.
In fourteen weeks of traveling this season, FOX’s Big Noon Kickoff came to us from the site of either the Wolverines’ or Buckeyes’ game eight times. The Indiana Hoosiers, undeniably the best team in college football this season, only got to be the focus of the show once when it was not playing one of the four preferred properties.
ESPN’s propaganda is either effective or wholly unnecessary. Whatever the case, SEC games dominated college football’s regular season ratings again. FOX isn’t innocent of propaganda accusations. The network just isn’t as good at it.
Remember, that FOX doesn’t hide from this. The network added Dave Portnoy to Big Noon Kickoff specifically to do propaganda – some of it to combat Urban Meyer and Ohio State, but most of it to combat Paul Finebaum and the SEC.
Everyone needs a Greg Sankey
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey is the subject of a lot of scorn and a lot of think pieces about what is wrong with the way college football is run. That scorn is misplaced. Those think pieces are dumb.
The commissioner of any conference has one job to do – make sure the conference and its members are in the best position for economic success. Sankey is louder about it and better at it than anyone else. If you have a problem with how he does his job, that’s because you don’t know what the job is.
Speaking of not knowing what the job of a conference commissioner is, I give you Jim Phillips. The ACC’s commissioner has kowtowed to Notre Dame so often that the second the conference does not bend over backwards to give the Fighting Irish their way, he’s forced to explain himself.
Personally, I’d rather have a commissioner that thinks about what works best for the conference and pursues targets like Texas and Oklahoma because they add value rather than pursuing Cal, Stanford and SMU because it’s what one school who refuses to become a full member of the conference wants.
Sankey has been commissioner of the SEC since 2015. Prior to that, he worked under previous conference commissioner Mike Slive for thirteen years. He came up in this conference’s culture and he loves college football. The Big Ten cannot say the same thing about Tony Pettiti. It could not say it about his predecessor, Kevin Warren. Both men came to college sports from the wider world and both immediately held their nose and started trying to change everything about it.
Personally, I’d rather have the guy that doesn’t publicly pine for college football to become NFL Lite running my college football conference.
The Big 12 may catch hell for some of the stunts it pulls to draw attention to its teams and its championship game, but commissioner Brett Yormark is the only guy even close to the same league as Sankey. He recognizes that the reality of college sports now is the Power 4 is really a Power 2 and an Other 2. He approaches his job with the goal of making it a “Power 3 and the ACC” instead of denying the reality that the rest of the world sees actually exists.
The SEC earned its reputation and all of the scorn that comes with it during the BCS era. Seven consecutive titles won by four different teams is an undeniably amazing feat. The conference’s level of success came back to the pack a bit with the introduction of the College Football Playoff. Still, in this era, the SEC has still seen Alabama hold the trophy three times, Georgia do it twice, LSU do it once and Ole Miss with a chance to join them. That level of success is going to earn the benefit of the doubt and it will undeniably create some media narratives that take too long to die off.
It’s also good for the sport. We spent all year saying “there’s something off about this Bama team,” but still treat Indiana’s Rose Bowl victory like something greater than the Hoosiers’ win over a much better Ohio State team in the Big Ten title game.
So let me paraphrase Col. Jessup. You want the SEC at the top of college football. You need the SEC at the top of college football. The Danny Kannells of the world need a big bad. The SEC makes their job easier.
About Demetri Ravanos