The SEC may stink

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It was abundantly clear that Heupel and co did not trust Nico to throw the ball last night

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That has been a theme all year, no?

Did people think Tenn was better than the other ~6 ok SEC teams? Didn’t both UF and Alabama hand them home wins in back to back weeks? Freshman QB can’t be trusted to throw at times.

To me, they’re right in the middle of the pack of your Alabama’s, Ole Miss’, and even UF’s. But those teams can mess up and be pretty lethal on offense sometimes. Or at least get lucky and make things happen with some of the individual talent they have on offense.

This Tennessee team having to go to OSU with their QB situation had very high potential to end poorly.

Tennessee avoided most good passing teams that could have exposed their weak secondary… they lucked out from a schedule and matchup perspective this year.

Bad array of factors.

Super conferences lead to the end of divisions and I know many here and elsewhere warned about this idiocy. This means that in a given year, you have a few teams that are mid-level but have an easy schedule. They run up 10 wins or so, and poof they're in the playoff. Meanwhile an 8 or 9 win team is actually better but had a much more difficult schedule. The conferences were warned and they expanded anyway. The committee was too stupid to see this and made horrible picks rather than putting their foot down and going with rigorous evaluations.

NIL and the portal are causing more damage in the SEC than anywhere else from what I can see. On3 gave the 15 best NIL collectives back in August. Ten of the programs were in the south with 7 of them SEC schools. This leads to roster dilution that most strongly affects the SEC. The others on the list were Ohio St, Michigan, Oregon, Notre Dame, Nebraska. Big10 has fewer disruptions for concentrating talent. It shows with their top teams being a big step up in talent.

I think the SEC run is over unless there emerges a clear concentration of NIL prowess among a smaller group of teams in the conference. That assumes fans don't give up and walk away.