SEC is only at primary care, but the diagnosis looks terminal

I think this is not immediate, but it may be a terminal diagnosis for the SEC as we know it.

This is bigger than a couple of players coming back from the NFL, because what this really exposed is that the SEC is not leading college football anymore, it is reacting to it.

The Big Ten has won three straight national championships with three different schools, while the SEC has not even played in those three title games, yet somehow the SEC keeps finding new ways to make its own road harder.

We did it with scheduling, and now we are doing it again with eligibility, because instead of telling the Big Ten good luck and letting SEC schools use every legal advantage available, the conference turned around and restricted its own members.

This was never LSU versus everybody else either, Ryan Day said Ohio State would evaluate it, Kirby Smart basically said to each their own, Florida looked at it, Texas and Missouri have been involved in these eligibility fights, and Kalen DeBoer acknowledged Alabama had a player they could potentially bring back while Greg Byrne was holding him back.

What bothers me even more is Paul Finebaum spending an entire day calling LSU a renegade school and publicly pushing Sankey and the SEC presidents to stop LSU, and while I cannot prove who he was talking to behind the scenes, anyone pretending Finebaum operates completely disconnected from SEC power brokers is being naive.

That is why LSU needs to look at this as something bigger than whether these players eventually win in court, because there was a real attack on the LSU brand from inside the SEC media ecosystem, and if LSU is ultimately proven right there needs to be some kind of walkback.

The NIL era, direct player payments, private capital, and the growing value of individual brands are changing where the power actually sits, and schools like LSU, Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and Texas A and M are eventually going to ask whether the SEC is helping them maximize their value or holding them back to protect the old power structure.

LSU voting for this rule was a mistake too, because if fifteen other schools wanted it LSU should have let them pass it fifteen to one and protected its own coach, its own players, and its own position.

TLDR, the SEC spent twenty years leading college football, but if it keeps reacting to the Big Ten, restricting its own best programs, and protecting an old power structure while its biggest schools become more powerful and independent, eventually those schools are going to realize the SEC needs them a lot more than they need the SEC.

-shortened per request . My bad