NEW ORLEANS — There was this telling moment a few minutes after the clock struck twelve on the SEC in the Sugar Bowl, when for the first time since 2005, every other conference in college football could breathe again.
In the middle of Ohio State’s celebration on the Superdome floor was Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, the whipping boy of the SEC’s reign over college football because — if for nothing else — his proximity to the eight years of shockwaves.
And he was talking about Michigan. Yes, everyone, Michigan.
“You look at what Ohio State has done now, you look at where Michigan is headed with Jim (Harbaugh) and the excitement that’s there,” Delany said. “These things go in cycles.”
This, of course, leads to the inevitable question: has the SEC’s down cycle officially begun?
“It’s one game,” said Alabama safety Landon Collins. “We’ve been playing great ball in the SEC for a long time before I got here and will be playing great ball in this league for a long time after I leave.”
If the SEC isn’t on a down cycle, it most surely is on one knee after a postseason that looked a whole lot like those Big Ten meltdowns of years past. The SEC West Division, the seven-team race that captured the narrative in the first College Football Playoff, was annihilated and humiliated in the postseason.
TCU crushed Ole Miss. Georgia Tech manhandled Mississippi State. Notre Dame and Wisconsin beat LSU and Auburn, respectively, on final plays of the game.
Then there’s Alabama, which lost to Ohio State after blowing a 15-point lead in the second quarter.
“Even when it was 21-6, I wasn’t comfortable,” said Alabama coach Nick Saban.
The entire SEC isn’t so comfortable right now. East Division heavyweights Florida and Georgia are in turmoil; the Gators in the middle of another coaching change and the Bulldogs trying to run off a coach who just won 10 games again.
Steve Spurrier just wrapped up his worst season at South Carolina, and Tennessee, despite the hope Butch Jones has built in Knoxville, hasn’t beaten anyone of significance since Phil Fulmer was coach. Even the hope of Vanderbilt was dashed at the end of last year when fiery coach James Franklin left for — this is too perfect — the Big Ten and Penn State.
Now put all that in context with what happened in the Sugar Bowl, with the way Ohio State coach Urban Meyer used his SEC plan from Florida to beat the bully of college football, and there’s no denying momentum is shifting.
But to say the SEC is dead is utterly laughable. This is still the conference with the best coaches in the game, still the league that recruits better than any other in the country. The framework of what has been built since the early 2000s is still there and still strong.
They just got punched in the gut at the same time.
As Thomas Jefferson once said, the tree of SEC dominance must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of Alabama and the SEC West.
Or something like that.