How the SEC Became the Alabama Conference

It was the night of January 9, 2012. Alabama was atop the college football world once again after a systematic dismantling of previously unbeaten and number one LSU. That season, culminating with a title matchup of two SEC West powers for the national championship, was the high point of the Southeastern Conference’s reign over college football.

Fast forward to January 9, 2017. Despite dropping its first national title game under Saban, the robotic death machine known as Crimson Tide football is still going strong. After seven straight years of holding the crystal football, the SEC has won just one title in the past four years though, and it was of course Alabama that carried the water.

The landscape of college football had changed drastically in those five years. The Southeastern Conference had gone from a whole head above the rest of the power five to downright average. In 2011 the SEC West alone had easily the two best teams in the country and maybe even the third. There were five teams that reached double digit wins. In 2016 there was just one. It had become the Alabama Conference. So what happened?

The short answer is the conference lost its star coaches. The SEC was stacked with elite coaching talent in the early 2010s. Nick Saban, Urban Meyer, Les Miles in his prime, Bobby Petrino, and Steve Spurrier were all coaching an SEC school. One of those coaches is still in the conference.

Urban Meyer quit at Florida for:

• health reasons?
• to spend more time with his family?
• because he was a Russian spy and his cover was blown?

for WHATEVER reason and ended up at Ohio State, taking the second best coach in the country out of the SEC and giving him to a perennial title contender of a different conference. This was sort of the beginning. Meyer was the closest thing the rest of the conference had to a Bama antidote. Maybe the Tide would still have rolled right on past Meyer’s Gators, which went just 8-4 in his final season. But from a coaching perspective, Meyer was the biggest Saban challenger in the conference.

The SEC would then lose Bobby Petrino in 2011. Petrino is an excellent offensive mind that nearly took Arkansas to the pinnacle of college football. He is also a dumbass and a garbage person and Arkansas literally died after his exit. The attempt to move on after Petrino’s embarrassment of the program was such a disaster that Arkansas went from a top ten team to a largely pointless existence in one offseason. King of mediocrity and self-implosion Bret Bielema is now coaching there.

South Carolina was even a title contender at times under Spurrier in the golden age of the SEC. His clock ran out though and he was replaced by Will Muschamp, whose claim to fame appears to be taking over for hall of fame coaches and just kind of existing there for a while.

In 2016 the SEC lost Les Miles as well. Realistically, Miles was probably on the downturn of his career as a coach. A declining Les Miles though would still be much better than what LSU ended up with, which is a coach that went 0-8 in the SEC in his last full season as a head coach. Orgeron is a great motivator, but if he can get LSU back on par with Alabama, I will eat my own foot. LSU just lost to Mississippi State by 30 points.

If the Tigers could have snagged Tom Herman like they intended, then firing Miles would’ve been acceptable. They didn’t though and this coaching change, like all the ones mentioned above, is a downgrade. That is the essence of what happened to the SEC. It was losing the great coaches, but it was also replacing them with coaches that could not be called great.

Coaching stability is both indicative of success and paramount to it in college football, and the SEC has not had very much of it over the past few years. Every team except Alabama that had 10+ wins in that incredible 2011 season has gone through a coaching change since, some more than once. Most importantly, all of them downgraded. It’s happened for a multitude of reasons, but the ultimate result is the same. They’re several steps behind the Crimson Tide.

Eventually things will probably return to the way they were. There is far too much tradition and money in the SEC for these programs to stay down for long. But for now, Will Muschamp and Bret Bielema are not leading any of these SEC programs to the top of the mountain.