The Big Ten is sitting atop the college football throne. It has been for a while now. The conference delivered its third straight national champion last season.
Plus, for the first time since 2015, the SEC didn’t have the most Day 1 NFL Draft picks. Fittingly, the Big Ten took its place.
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The SEC, which was responsible for four straight national titles from 2019-22 and had reigned throughout most of the 21st century, is looking to return to dominance. The shift in the pecking order has sparked discourse, especially this offseason.
Georgia head coach Kirby Smart, whose Bulldogs won the SEC’s last two national championships while going back-to-back in 2021 and 2022, joined the conversation on Thursday at the Regions Tradition Pro-Am at Greystone Golf & County Club in Hoover, Alabama.
“I can’t figure out what it is,” Smart said in a discussion with “The Next Round,” when contemplating the Big Ten’s recent streak of success.
“I just think they have a more competitive conference, like the top of their conference. There’s more good teams. It used to be, ‘Eh, Ohio State is good.’ Michigan was really good with [Jim] Harbaugh, they had a great team. Indiana’s good. Now they got Oregon. They got a draw. They have the ability to attract good players.”
Smart continued: “Now, NIL has a factor, too, for sure. But so does Miami. People have money. More people have money. So I think the talent is spread out thin. Where before, in the SEC, it was a magnet to talent. The disparity was so great that it was like you couldn’t mess it up, you’d win regardless. And now it’s like, ‘OK, it’s more even.’ And it’s just been three in a row.”
In 2023, Harbaugh’s final season coaching Michigan, his Wolverines got over the hump, authoring a 15-0 season, albeit a scandal-ridden one, en route to championship glory. Then in 2024, rival Ohio State ended a nine-year title drought, winning the first-ever 12-team College Football Playoff.
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This past season, Indiana reached the sport’s summit, completing the most unlikely of college football turnarounds. Curt Cignetti took a program that was long among the worst in the Power Four and, in just two seasons, transformed it into a national champion.
“It can change quick, but that doesn’t explain why the Big Ten’s been able to do that,” Smart said. “And that’s just … I have so much respect for them. I’m like, ‘Are they better coaches than us?’“
Smart noted earlier in his appearance that the SEC still had the most total draft picks of any conference this year. Over the three-day event in Pittsburgh, 87 SEC players were selected, the most from one conference in NFL history.
“They’re taking less talent, in theory, and doing more with it,” Smart said of the Big Ten.
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Although complimentary, Smart wasn’t bowing down to the Big Ten. As he said above, he still hasn’t wrapped his head around why, lately, the SEC has dropped a rung on the proverbial championship ladder.
He’s clearly open to mulling conjectures.
“Now, the other theory is, and this is what nobody likes to hear,” Smart prefaced.
“A lot of SEC coaches say this in my meetings. They say, ‘[The Big Ten doesn’t] have the grind we do. There’s no way. Three of their nine [conference] games are hard. Their bottom-four games are not our bottom-four games. I’m going to play at Starkville [Mississippi State] and Vanderbilt in my bottom four, and I’m holding onto my butt to be able to play at noon on Saturday at Starkville and playing a good team who beat Arizona State, who goes and plays these other teams.’”
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He added: “So there is a theory that we’re beating each other up. It’s like the intensity wears you down.”
Granted the Big Ten features more contenders now than it used to, in part because it expanded to 18 teams, but the contrast between the top and bottom of the league remains strong. There are some weeks upper-echelon Big Ten teams can use to strategically tease or test concepts while bolstering their depth.
“Their players get a mental relief and then it’s like, ‘Boom.’ They get to go to the playoffs and crank it up,” Smart said.
