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Someone might want to pour Jim Delany a tall glass of Ciroc. For his conference, the first week of college football has basically been the weekend after Spring Break in college and you’re all sitting around saying, “What the heck happened last week?”
The juxtaposition of that is the SEC, whose reports of demise were greatly exaggerated. Obviously, with this playoff stuff, it’s about best teams versus best conferences, but it’s clear after week one that anyone prognosticating an SEC-less playoff is already wrong.
The SEC champ could lose three games this year and get in, I think, at this point.
The rub with playing out of conference games you might actually be able to lose is that sometimes … you lose. It’s like asking a pretty girl out. Sometimes, she has a boyfriend. On the other end of the spectrum, sometimes she says yes, or that she doesn’t care if she does or not because she’d rather go out with you.
For the SEC, they simply had to walk up to the bar last night and point at who they wanted to date. Wisconsin became the latest victim on Alabama’s neutral site tour of doom, as teams still haven’t figured out that putting Nick Saban on the schedule in Game 1 on a neutral field is like sticking your hand down the garbage disposal to find where the clog is.
Perhaps even more impressive was Texas A&M, which had in-game quarterback issues and still found a way to slay top 15 Arizona State from the Pac-12, which, frankly, would be the talk of the sordid side of town if the Big Ten wasn’t so hell-bent on tinkling down its leg all day.
Florida played New Mexico State and put up 61 points, which the Gators might not have scored total in the Will Muschamp era.
As for the conference’s final high-profile game, Auburn withstood a bit of a rally from Louisville and iced that ACC foe on a neutral field as well. It was, all in all, a remarkable day for a conference that was entering 2015 with more questions about its strength than normal.
South Carolina defeated North Carolina on Thursday, but that game had more the look of two people trying to mow grass in the dark, and one just finally got finished first.
On the other end of the spectrum was the Big Ten, which enjoyed the fruits of being doubted and everyone else being wrong when Ohio State carried the flag for the conference last season and Michigan State helped out in large ways. The Big Ten is different from the SEC in that there’s not much love lost or any brotherhood among the schools’ fan bases.
The upside is, as long as their champ (whoever it is) keeps winning, they’ll get in, especially if it turns out to be one of the nationally respected heavyweights, OSU or MSU. The downside is, the margin of error versus the champs of other conferences gets a bit smaller when your entire conference other than Northwestern got flogged and whipped all week.
Michigan looks like it has a ways to go, though most anyone is going to lose in Utah. Wisconsin, well, we already talked about the Badgers. Nebraska received the hardest knee-capping, losing at home on a Hail Mary as time expired to BYU, throwing into the wind with a backup quarterback.
Minnesota was game against TCU, but at no point did it look like the Gophers would actually win. Penn State … well … I’m pretty sure a mailbox sacked Christian Hackenberg on Saturday in the Nittany Lions’ loss to Temple. That offensive line still looks sketchy to say the least.
What does all of this mean? Really, not much. If we’re talking BCS, perception can doom you almost instantly. If you’re talking about a playoff, most of this conference strength stuff doesn’t matter.
Still, it was an impressive re-showing by the SEC, flexing its muscle maybe as never before seen, reminding us all that this stuff varies annually and we don’t know jack until we start playing games. One thing’s for sure … the SEC will be hanging around come playoff time.
And the Big Ten needs that hair of the dog.
