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An SEC head football coach is raising eyebrows for attributing the conference’s lack of national titles in recent years to schedules being too difficult.
Ahead of the first season of a compulsory nine-game conference schedule, coaches are already having regrets, Eli Drinkwitz of the Missouri Tigers told reporters at SEC Media Days, as detailed by Brandon Marcello of CBS Sports.
He added that he believes the reason the Big Ten has taken home the past three national titles is at least in part because their squads aren’t required to play a non-conference A4 — otherwise known as Power Four — team each year, as detailed by Brett McMurphy of On3.
“There’s been a couple of reasons (for the Big Ten’s success),” he said. “I think there was some great decisions by their leadership. There’s some things we look back on in the SEC and maybe we shouldn’t have done it that way.
“There’s also cycles to college football. And once you get into expanded playoffs, it’s all about matchups and draws and our matchups and draws haven’t been as good as we obviously wanted them to be in order to be successful.”
SEC’s Playoff Struggles Aren’t a Regular-Season Problem
Drinkwitz seems to be making the case that the seeding is what costs the SEC in the postseason, and that seeding is based on regular season results and conference championships.
Yes, removing some of those non-conference cupcake games and replacing them with another SEC game and a matchup with a Power Four opponent will result in more losses for SEC teams than they would have in years prior.
But as anyone who watched last year’s playoff will tell you, seeding was hardly a determinative factor.
Miami squeaked into the playoff as the lowest-seeded Power Four team, needing an early-season win over Notre Dame to put them into the mix ahead of the Fighting Irish.
Despite that, Miami made it all the way to the title game and fell less than a touchdown short against champion Indiana.
Along the way, the Hurricanes beat Texas A&M in College Station, topped the highly touted Ohio State Buckeyes by 10 points and beat Ole Miss in the semifinals.
In Drinkwitz’s defense, SEC teams paired off twice in the playoff: Alabama vs. Oklahoma in the first round, and Ole Miss vs. Georgia in the quarterfinals.
Seeding may have helped avoid SEC-on-SEC games, but as anyone who watched the season would tell you, once the players strap on their helmets and hit the field, things like seeding, program history and conference go out the window.
Just ask Alabama, who got slaughtered by the Hoosiers 38-3 in the Rose Bowl.
So while Drinkwitz may have a point that hypothetically, a great SEC team could be left out of the CFP with a loss they otherwise wouldn’t have had, that doesn’t change what matters most: those games in December and January.
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