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Three Years Without a National Title Has Brought Out the Worst of the Arrogant and Smug SEC

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: May 28th, 2026 · 12:26 PM EDT

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It’s a slow day. The Phillies are off. We did some Union and Eagles stuff already.

So I was scanning ESPN and came across two stories that really pissed me off. They both have to do with SEC football.

This one from Heather Dinich is titled “Sankey touts SEC as best ‘by far’ despite Big Ten dominance” –

MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — The Big Ten has won the past three national titles in football and is 4-0 against the SEC over the past three seasons in head-to-head College Football Playoff matchups, but SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said Wednesday those metrics are a “pretty narrow band” and his league still “stands alone.”

“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 following the second full day of SEC spring meetings. “But you’re going to lose games when it’s close and competitive like that. So why have they surpassed us? It’s an oddball, it’s bounced a couple times the wrong way.”

…

“I can assure you that everyone in this league is trying to figure out how to come up on the top end of that in the future,” Sankey said, “But I think from a big picture, the breadth, the depth of this league, this league 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.”

And then this one doesn’t have a byline, but it’s titled “With expansion argument brewing, Smart hints at SEC secession” –

Conversations around conference expansion have dominated the college football spring meetings thus far, and Kirby Smart’s comments on Tuesday about the SEC essentially seceding have created plenty of questions.

The Georgia coach suggested that if an agreement can’t be reached on expansion, spending in the NIL era and beyond, perhaps the SEC should try to go it alone.

“I’ve said this for a long time to our president,” Smart said on Tuesday. “I’ve been a huge advocate that if we can’t find rules that everybody plays by, then we should play our own. I’m not afraid of that. I’m not afraid to break away and say that our conference is strong enough to go out and play.

This is really soft. The other conferences took it on the chin from the SEC for years and didn’t complain about it or downplay it. Now the roles have been reversed over the last few seasons and the SEC wants to take their football and go home. That’s the energy Kirby Smart is giving off here, and smug Sankey has always thought himself to be the most important person in college football. These guys are so arrogant, walking around like they can do no wrong. Sankey, Smart, and every football fan south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Boundless arrogance! It’s like we all should worship at the altar of Georgia and Alabama and the almighty ARKANSAS and KENTUCKY because nobody else in this country plays good football.

“Oh we’re all in the presence of the exalted Mr. Sankey! Mr. Sankey can I get you a coffee? We’re just lucky to be in the same room as you!”

Give me a fucking break.

The SEC had five teams in the playoff this past season, and two of them lost to an ACC school. Indiana hammered Alabama by 35 points. 35! In fact, the only non-SEC school that the SEC beat in the playoff was Tulane. Their other victories were against themselves, guaranteeing an SEC victory.

And the year prior, SEC teams lost in the playoff to Notre Dame and Ohio State (twice), while Texas (a fake SEC team), was the lone semifinal representative. It’s been three full seasons now since the best league that mankind has ever known has won the natty, and it’s obviously really bugging them. They haven’t even had a team in the final!

SEC arrogance has existed for a long time, but this current college football zeitgeist has just made it worse. The NIL and super-conference era has turned one of the country’s greatest sporting landscapes into an arms race, with the rich getting richer and everybody else left holding the bag. There’s nothing compelling about mass transfers and paying for the best players in the country anyway. The whole point of NIL in the first place was to compensate players for work that made OTHER PEOPLE money. It was a labor issue more than anything else. Throwing gross amounts of money at players was never how this was supposed to work out, because now you’ve just created a classic “haves” and “have nots” situation.

Maybe they get this sorted by putting some guardrails back into place and leveling the playing field and coming up with something fair at the college level. Maybe the SEC schools go back to paying their players under the table, the way it used to be. The good old days, when you had to actually go out and recruit players instead of just buying them, unless you did it illegally. And Kirby Smart should focus on his real job, which is developing players for the Philadelphia Eagles.