Big Ten’s Postseason Success Exposes SEC Slide

As the college football postseason season winds down and we’ve entered a new year, we now have a large enough sample size to evaluate some obvious trends. What a lot of fans will look at is how the conferences are faring against one another, notably the big behemoths Big Ten and SEC.

Many factors play into how well certain teams do in the postseason, especially these days. In this era of opt outs, the transfer portal and NIL, it’s sometimes difficult to pinpoint the current direction of a program, let alone a conference. 

Changing of the Guard

However, I’ll cut to the chase. It is obvious that the Big Ten is the best conference in college football and the SEC is trending downward. Don’t get me wrong, the SEC is probably as strong as ever in some ways but the dominance we saw as recently as three years ago with Georgia off back-to-back national championships is gone. If you recall, the 2022 National Championship game was all SEC: Georgia vs. Alabama. The latter, of course, pretty much dominated college football throughout Nick Saban’s 17 seasons in Tuscaloosa.

Since then, the Big Ten has claimed the last two championships, had the top two seeds in this season’s playoff, with Indiana the No. 1 being the clear-cut favorite moving forward after their own dominance over Alabama in the Rose Bowl. Looking at postseason records so far, the Big Ten is 9-4 compared to the SEC’s 4-8. Remove the Big Ten debacles from their New Year’s Eve matchups and the conference is 9-1 in the postseason.

These records don’t paint a complete picture with opt outs and coaching changes impacting rosters, but all teams are impacted and what a great team performance in a non-playoff game can tell you is how much depth your program has. 

The perfect example was Ohio State in the 2021 season when future first round WRs Chris Olave and Garrett Wilson opted out we saw the next set of superstar WRs Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Marvin Harrison Jr. shine in a Rose Bowl that was outside of the CFP rotation that year.

This year’s Rose Bowl was the easy example of the Big Ten surge at the SEC’s expense. Indiana’s destruction of Alabama was an epic one, a 38-3 blowout. From a more historical perspective we can add insult to injury here as well. Indiana, the perennial doormat of Big Ten football dominated the gold standard of the SEC and arguably all of college football in Alabama.

Iowa Says It All

However, the game I point to from this postseason was the ReliaQuest Bowl where Iowa defeated Vanderbilt 34-27. The Iowa defense dominated Vanderbilt in the first half which included four sacks of Heisman Trophy runner-up QB Diego Pavia. In all fairness, Pavia and the Vandy offense did rally in the second half before falling short.