CLEMSON -- Yesterday, the most plugged-in college football reporter shared a startling quote from an SEC school official.
Ross Dellenger broached a topic that SEC and Big Ten leaders have discussed and even threatened:
Would the Power 2 really leave the College Football Playoff and stage their own postseason?
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And then this from that aforementioned SEC school official, who went unnamed:
"There would be no argument that the winner is the national champion, right?" Dellenger quoted this person saying.
Our reflex was to read it again, and then again, and ask ourselves if this was maybe tongue-in-cheek.
Probably not.
Probably just another reflection of a conference's infatuation with itself.
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Look: We're not here to bash the SEC's long-held record of playing football better than everyone else. Much more often than not that's been the case.
We're also not trying to diminish the fact that the upper tier in the Big Ten has been quite powerful as well, evidenced by it claiming the past two national championships.
After all, there's a reason that Clemson fans and Florida State fans and fans of plenty other schools are clamoring to end up in one of those two conferences.
And anyone familiar with our record here knows we're not ACC fanboys. Quite the opposite in fact, most recently evidenced by a piece a few days ago that highlighted why the conference isn't in the same galaxy as the SEC and Big Ten.
But that's about a collective body.
You don't have to go back far to find examples of singular bodies from the ACC showing they don't take a back seat to the best offered by the SEC and Big Ten.
Heck, just look at the present. Clemson is almost unanimously regarded as a legitimate contender for the national title in 2025.
Two years ago Florida State was a legitimate contender before it lost perhaps the most valuable player in college football when Jordan Travis went down late in the year.
We could go on, back to Clemson's six-year stretch of brilliance from 2015-20. Or the Seminoles' 2013 national title and playoff trip the next year.
But we really shouldn't have to.
If you're cowering in fear over the threat of the SEC and Big Ten blowing the whole thing up, our advice would be to relax.
Because there are signs the SEC as a whole is starting to read the room better than it has before.
There are a lot of fans in that room who aren't fans of the SEC and Big Ten getting four automatic bids apiece.
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A lot of fans, including probably more in the SEC than the SEC itself envisioned when it thought this was a good idea, who prefer for bids to be earned through competition.
This is how the ACC-backed "5+11" format (five automatic bids for conference champions, and 11 at-large) is actually gaining some traction, to the point that now the SEC might be feeling the urge to tell the Big Ten and its 4-4-2-2-1 model to go jump in Lake Michigan.
Last year, the SEC and Big Ten used the threat of the nuclear option (take ball, go home) to get their way on 58 percent of playoff money starting in 2026.
But more and more people are becoming turned off by the idea of all the power resting in the hands of the most, well, powerful.
Dellenger, on nuclear option:
But such a move may be viewed as political suicide for two conferences that are fighting for congressional assistance. After all, more than half of U.S. states don’t have an SEC or Big Ten school in their boundaries.
How would their U.S. senators and congressmen react to the implosion of the industry?
Perhaps that’s why the SEC and Big Ten have not yet decided on a format, Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin said earlier this week.
“That’s why we haven’t moved forward,” he told reporters Tuesday. “We’re trying to navigate all that. That’s where Greg Sankey is so good. He’s got a great way of navigating and bringing people along together. We’re trying to find solutions to legitimate questions and the solutions are not easy. Something has got to give somewhere.”
Again, the powers that be are going to have to get a lot better at reading the room.
The room doesn't seem to be keen on a Rest of Y'all Bus when it comes to automatic, inequitable distribution of bids.
And it definitely isn't going to be cool with two conferences staging their own playoff.
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Could it be that the SEC and Big Ten now find themselves pitted against each other?
Could it be that the ACC, for once, comes off as the noble and likable underdog as it fights against world domination by the Power 2?
This is getting interesting.
