Football Capital of the South

The mystique of the SEC Championship

- Posted on December 5, 2025

Nick Saban after Alabama defeated Missouri in the 2014 SEC Championship Game: “I’ve never wanted a group to have a chance to be successful in a game as I did tonight in winning the SEC Championship. I think that everybody sort of minimizes the importance of this game now and wants to talk about the playoff, but I’ll tell you what, it’s a significant accomplishment. I’ve been in this league for a long time. It’s tough to win. It’s tough to win in your division, and it’s tough to win in this game.”

Kirby Smart before the 2025 SEC Championship Game between Georgia and Alabama: “There’s also an opportunity to win the SEC championship. Does that matter? Does anybody care about that anymore? I grew up thinking that was the greatest game in the world.”

I can’t remember when I started feeling like the SEC Championship was such a big deal. I think it was probably sometime in late 80s or early 90s. I started watching college football in the early 1980s. Back then there was no SEC Championship Game, but there was an SEC Champion. I don’t know whether the SEC was the nation’s best football conference in the 1980s, but to me it was far and away the coolest conference. These days I guess most people would call it the best football conference in the country, myself included, and it’s still the coolest conference, by an even further distance than before.

This is the conference of Paul Bryant, Herschel Walker, Bo Jackson, Joe Burrow, Joe Namath, the Mannings, Steve Spurrier, Nick Saban, Jack Cristil, Tiger Stadium, The Swamp, Tim Tebow, Cam Newton, Johnny Manziel, Billy Cannon, and on and on and on. This is the conference where Auburn and LSU played a football game while a building burned in the background.

I could list a thousand crazy and cool things that have happened in the SEC over the years and I’d still be leaving out a bunch of really interesting stuff.

That’s all opinion of course. But for those of us who hold that opinion, winning the SEC Championship is a huge deal. Winning the National Championship is amazing. It’s probably what most players, coaches, and fans want more than anything for their team. But there’s something special about winning the SEC Championship. It’s hard to put your finger on, but Nick Saban knows it. Kirby Smart knows it. I think players who grew up in the SEC footprint know it.

There was a time when you pretty much had to win the SEC to have a shot at the National Championship, but those days are over. In the current era, it has been said plenty of times that bypassing the SEC Championship Game and still getting into the College Football Playoff can be advantageous to SEC teams that end up in that situation, and I see the logic in that point of view.

But the SEC Championship Game. The Georgia Dome. Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Legion Field back in the day. To bypass that is to miss out on the mystique of the most mystical conference in college football.

I love the College Football Playoff. I love the 12-team playoff. I think it’s great and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to go back to the 4-team playoff, or the BCS, or any of those other ways of determining the National Champion of college football.

But I also love the SEC Championship.

Being the best team in the toughest conference, being the champion of the conference where they chant “SEC, SEC, SEC” at the end of the conference championship game is just cool, and in my mind it will never not be cool.

Five SEC football programs announce new head coaches on the same day

- Posted on November 30, 2025

Today, Sunday, November 30, the day after the end of the 2025 SEC regular season, the following 5 head football coaching hires were announced:

• Alex Golesh named head coach at Auburn
• Jon Sumrall named head coach at Florida
• Ryan Silverfield named head coach at Arkansas
• Lane Kiffin named head coach at LSU
• Pete Golding named head coach at Ole Miss

I tried to list these in the order the hires occurred, but I’m not sure of the exact time of each announcement, so the order could be wrong.

I don’t recall another instance of 5 SEC football head coaches being announced at new jobs on the same day. Anybody who follows SEC football knows that things had been building toward this day for a long time. I guess it finally got here.

It’s going to be fascinating to watch how this plays out and to see where these programs and coaches are 3 or 4 years from now.

Vanderbilt, Tennessee and Texas get nice wins on a quiet SEC weekend while Oklahoma defense continues to dominate

- Posted on November 24, 2025

Nobody would call this past Saturday a huge weekend in SEC football matchups. A lot of SEC teams played easy out of conference games, which is fine. But there were 4 SEC vs. SEC matchups:

• #8 Oklahoma 17, #22 Missouri 6 (at Oklahoma)
• #14 Vanderbilt 45, Kentucky 17 (at Vanderbilt)
• #17 Texas 52, Arkansas 37 (at Texas)
• #20 Tennessee 31, Florida 11 (at Florida)

Let’s leave Oklahoma vs. Missouri aside for now and talk about Vanderbilt, Tennessee, and Texas.

So Vandy won by 28, Tennessee won by 20, and Texas won by 15. I found this kind of interesting because these are now the #6, #7, and #8 teams in the SEC standings (I guess the order is #6 Texas, #7 Vanderbilt, and #8 Tennessee depending on how the SEC figures that out. Texas beat Vanderbilt head to head so I assume that counts for something.

Anyway, it’s kind of interesting, just because with 16 teams in the SEC now, being in the top 8 of the conference puts you in the top half of the league, which maybe doesn’t sound like a big deal, but given the quality of the conference, it’s actually not that easy to be in the top half of it at this point. In fact, as things stand right now, the top 5 teams in the SEC are in the top 10 of the College Football Playoff rankings.

Vanderbilt plays Tennessee at Knoxville this Saturday, with the Commodores still having an outside shot to make the playoff, so that’s a pretty big game coming. And Texas will host Texas A&M in Austin on Friday. It’s probably nearly impossible for the Longhorns to make the playoffs, but a win over Texas A&M would still be a big deal to give the Aggies their first loss of the season in a rivalry game.

Now let’s talk about Oklahoma. That defense is playing at such a high level. For the third straight game, the Sooners were outgained in total yardage by the other team, but got the win anyway. If you think about the days when we used to talk about how defense wins championships, it feels like OU has a legitimate shot in the CFP based on how they are playing on that side of the ball.