Illinois, Michigan hand SEC more humbling bowl defeats

It's just tougher in the SEC. At least that is what the SEC wants you to believe.

If you, for some reason, do not believe, just ask any SEC team, super fan or affiliated media member and they will happily tell you that the SEC is just built different, and that teams from other conferences simply could not hack it playing their schedule.

That talking point reached a boiling point in the wake of this year's College Football Playoff field as Alabama, South Carolina and Ole Miss were all left out of the field — all with three losses — in favor of one-loss teams from the ACC and Big Ten like SMU and Indiana. 

When the latter teams were handed decisive losses in their opening round playoff games, it only strengthened the noise about how the three-loss SEC should have been in and how they were better teams.

It became a fight of hypotheticals. What if Indiana played South Carolina's schedule? What if Alabama played SMU's schedule? What would Ole Miss do to the ACC? 

That noise should have been silenced, and emphatically so, on Tuesday when Michigan and No. 20 Illinois handed No. 11 Alabama and No. 15 South Carolina losses in their bowl games, delivering a humbling blow to the SEC and its apparent superiority. 

It's not that the SEC isn't a great conference. It is. It is traditionally one of the strongest conferences in the country and typically has some of the best teams and top national championship contenders.

But sometimes the hype gets out of control, and sometimes too many people associated with the conference forget that it is not the only one that matters. Winning games there is not the end-all and be-all for competitive football.

Other conferences can compete. Other teams can compete. Especially in the modern era of college football. 

While the transfer portal and the rise of NIL have some real flaws and issues that are worthy of being put under a microscope, there is something else those new elements have done to college football — they have dramatically and significantly closed the gap between the top-tier teams and the second-tier teams.

The SEC's overall performance in bowl games this season helps illustrate that, with Oklahoma (to Navy), Tennessee (to Ohio State), Alabama (to Michigan), Texas A&M (to USC) and South Carolina (to Illinois) all losing games they were favored to win. 

Just imagine if No. 2 Georgia loses to No. 7 Notre Dame on Wednesday, or if No. 14 Ole Miss loses to Duke in the Gator Bowl on Thursday. 

The College Football Playoff is far from perfect, and it can get annoying using the result of every playoff game and bowl game as a referendum on every decision that gets made. But for all of those flaws, and for all of the strengths the SEC has, it is awfully difficult for anybody to keep arguing that Alabama, South Carolina or Ole Miss got robbed by not being in.

Especially after the former two already lost their fourth games of the season to second-tier Big Ten teams. 

The SEC is great. It is not above everybody else. Somebody had to humble them and knock them down a peg. Michigan and Illinois did a great job of that on Tuesday.