Someone needs to check SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey’s mental state. Speaking at SEC meetings this past week in Miami, he continued to beat the sweet tea and grits conference despite the numbers saying otherwise.
The Big Ten has won the last three College Football Playoff national championships (Michigan, Ohio State, and Indiana), with the SEC not even being in the national title game during that time frame. Not only that, but the SEC has gone 0-4 against the Big Ten in CFP games over the last three years, so, yeah. One would think it would be a foregone conclusion that the heartland is where the best football is being played now.
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Well, not according to Sankey.
“If you look at the entirety of our league, we are by far the most competitive, the strongest football league by far,” Sankey told reporters at the SEC meetings on Wednesday.
His rationale is a bit comical, too, something only an SEC homer could try to spin, claiming the games the Big Ten has won in the CFP have been a small sample size. “That’s a pretty narrow band,” he said of the College Football Playoff head-to-head results between the two leagues.
“You look at the Texas-Ohio State (CFP Cotton Bowl semifinal), Texas scores, there’s a screen play (by Ohio State), breaks the game open,” Sankey said. “You go to possessions in the red zone, really close, and there’s a (Texas) turnover.”
We’d like to take this time to remind Sankey that all of those plays were a part of the game and made by Ohio State. Those games should be razor-thin at that point, but the better team made the plays it needed to win. Sankey wasn’t done doing his best impression of a politician stuck in extreme partisanship.
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“I think from a big picture, the breadth, the depth of this league, this league (SEC), stands alone. In fact, we saw metrics out of the College Football Playoff presentation where there’s no doubt we’re the strongest league. Now, there’s some segments of other leagues that are towards where we are, but not nearly the entirety of a conference, like the Southeastern Conference. It’s a pretty special place.”
Wait, we thought it “just means more?” You know SEC folks would be beating their chests over the last three years if that’s what the conference could boast about. Apparently, coming close — wait — getting into the College Football Playoff is good enough now to be called elite.
C’mon Greg.
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This article originally appeared on Buckeyes Wire: SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey thinks SEC IS Better than Big Ten still
