Oh the goalposts, they are a movin’.
The 2025-2026 college football season seemed to provide a final answer to a commonplace question around the sport: which conference is, currently, the best? After years of SEC dominance, the past few years have flipped to the Big Ten. The last three national champions have come from the Big Ten — Indiana, Ohio State and Michigan.
And importantly, not one SEC team has even made the National Championship Game in the past three tries. For a conference that bills itself as the best, where games just “mean more,” where the conference commissioner advocates for seven teams in a 12-team playoff field, that’s an embarrassment.
“I actually think we deserve seven in,” SEC head Greg Sankey said referring to the number of conference teams that should be in the playoff. “I think the seven teams that are in the top-14, half of the top 14 teams are from the SEC. That’s an indication that this league is different, the expectations are different, the competition is different, and the rewards should respect each of those elements.”
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When you make those kinds of statements, you have to back it up. Especially considering that the SEC’s success primarily came in the pre-NIL era.
That’s just one example. There are many, many others. And we can add yet another absurd excuse for the SEC’s poor performance from a new interview with LSU head coach Lane Kiffin.
Kiffin joined Barstool Sports’ “Pardon My Take,” where “Big Cat” asked him about the debate between the Big Ten and SEC. “Is the SEC dead though,” he asked, “because the Big Ten kinda whoops the SEC now.”
“It’s fair,” Kiffin said. “It’s a fair statement.”
“Why do you think it’s been so long since the SEC won a natty,” “PFT” asked. That’s where Kiffin started in by bringing up a new version of the same excuse.
“There’s a lot (that goes) into that. I think it’s set up in a good way for the top-heavy teams there right now. And it’s going to get better,” Kiffin said. “We’re going to nine games, and our bottom is harder than theirs. And our bottom stadiums are harder (to play in) than theirs. So we’re going to beat each other up more, and they’re going to sit up there and have 2-3 hard games a year.
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“So, their top teams and our top teams, when they go to the Playoffs, they’re in better shape. And that stuff matters. That’s why, I’ve always been a proponent to stay at eight games, let us make our own, whoever we want to play, don’t tell us who we have to play. Last place I was just at, we went 20-0 in regular season nonconference games at Ole Miss, we didn’t play in them big like, openers. This place in a four-year span, lost three of four openers.
“‘That’s so great, whatever,’ but you don’t get rewarded for it.
“That (Big Ten) schedule where half your games you don’t have to get up for, it’s just a mental toll. And also, many of your good players are out by the fourth quarter, so your play count at the end of the year is less,” he added. “One of the really good teams there rested their good players in conference games at the end of the year.”
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This is a level of absurdity, lack of awareness and excuse making that is impressive even for the SEC.
Kiffin celebrates himself for scheduling easy non-conference games at Ole Miss, and decrying the move to a nine-game conference schedule. Then says the Big Ten, which plays nine conference games, has had it easier than the SEC. That is, of course, ridiculous. If you’re playing one fewer conference game and giving yourself four free wins a year, you are at an advantage, not disadvantage. Even if that one extra conference game is against a top-50 team instead of a top-35 team, win probability goes from 99% against Furman to 73% against Rutgers. And that difference matters. A lot.
Then there’s the timing argument he makes, which might be the most inaccurate one any coach has ever made. SEC teams famously schedule themselves bye weeks in November to rest up for bigger games late in the season.
Ole Miss under Kiffin in 2025 played The Citadel on Nov. 9. They won 49-0, and Trinidad Chambliss was out of the game midway through the third quarter. He’s criticizing other teams for the ability to rest players late in the season when that’s exactly what he did at Ole Miss. His 2025 schedule was so perfectly constructed that the Rebels didn’t leave the state of Mississippi after Oct. 25. He didn’t give himself a free bye week in November in 2024, but in 2023, they hosted ULM on Nov. 18 to allow starters to rest.
Compare that to say, USC in 2025, which went from playing Notre Dame in South Bend on Oct. 18, to Nebraska in Lincoln on Nov. 1, Northwestern in LA on Nov. 8, Iowa in LA on Nov. 15, to Eugene, Oregon on Nov. 22, and UCLA back in LA on Nov. 29.
There are no starters being rested in those games. Oregon finished 4th, Notre Dame 10th and Iowa 17th in the final AP Top 25. And does Kiffin think playing at Nebraska is an “easy stadium” compared to his very tough roadtrip to Starkville?
It’s ridiculous, and he’s just making stuff up to excuse away the SEC’s poor performance.
Ohio State went Penn State, at Purdue, UCLA, Rutgers, at Michigan to finish out the season. Indiana finished the regular season by playing Ohio State in the Big Ten Championship Game, while Ole Miss rested and Kiffin hopped on LSU’s private jet.
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USC views itself as a potential playoff team this year. Their schedule includes a road trip to defending national champion Indiana, Ohio State, Oregon, Washington and a road trip to Penn State. Does that sound like two to three hard games per year?
Let’s look at travel. LSU’s longest “road trip” is around 750 miles, one way. Their total travel, for the year, is around 2,980 miles. They only leave the Central time zone twice, all season, to jump all of one hour on trips to Gainesville and Knoxville. USC, meanwhile, has three individual road trips of more than 2,000 miles. Their total travel for the season is 9,115 miles. USC plays more frequently in the Eastern Time Zone this upcoming season than LSU does, and adds a game in a two-hour different time zone. That stuff matters, as Kiffin would so haughtily say.
This is what SEC coaches do. First, they won titles because the conference was the best, and their teams were battle hardened more than the Big Ten or other conferences. Now, their conference is just too hard, so their teams are exhausted after a month off between the end of the regular season and the playoff, all while enjoying an FCS bye week in November.
They demand that every SEC team with five or six wins make the playoff because the stadiums are big or something, then ignore the results when those teams get embarrassed. Remember, they went 1-8 in bowl games last year, including losses to “bottom teams” like Illinois, Iowa, Houston and Virginia. Indiana beat Alabama 38-3 in a game that wasn’t even that close. They were 0-3 in the playoff against non-SEC Power Four conference teams.
That’s why Kiffin’s making stuff up now — can’t be acknowledging the truth when using excuses is far more effective.
