Analysis | How the SEC lost its grip on college football as the Big Ten has taken over

You remember. The Strength Everywhere Conference of Saban, Sankey and Smart. The league that produced Heisman Trophies and high draft picks. The football consortium that had been hoarding national championships at a record pace since before some current freshmen were born. What used to be the center of the college football universe. That Southeastern Conference.

It can now be logically concluded that the SEC is in a slump. Or a downturn. Or a recession, or whatever you want to call it. Maybe something worse.

It's no longer just a talking point. It's a football fact. After winning 13 titles in 17 years, the SEC has missed the national championship game three years in a row for the first time since 2001. That's a nice, tidy introduction to a story that will help define the 2026 season and beyond.

This account doesn't get past the intro without mentioning the Big Ten's role in what is increasingly looking like a takeover. The league has won three consecutive football national championships for the first time since 1942. For starters. Mix in Michigan hoops, and the Big Ten holds the men's basketball and football championships simultaneously for the first time since 1960 - or since a sophomore named Bob Knight was coming off the bench for Ohio State, and since the immortal Murray Warmath led the Minnesota Golden Gophers tothe Rose Bowl.

Throw in UCLA women's hoops, and the Big Ten is the first Division I conference with three different schools winning in football and men's and women's basketball in the same academic year.

For those used to the lofty, sweet home Southern standard the SEC has set all these years, these are tough times.

"I'm sitting in Birmingham right now across from SEC headquarters," radio and television personality Paul Finebaum told Athlon Sports during the offseason. "I can't speak for them, but I can speak for myself. I can tell you there is real concern.

"It was part of our psyche that we were better, and we wore it on our sleeve. We would tell anybody who would listen. This is a shock to the system."

At worst, the SEC has been lapped by its chief conference rival. For the moment, the Big Ten has cracked the code on NIL, the transfer portal, player development, program building and return on recruiting investment.

Finebaum, ESPN's face of the conference who appears daily on the SEC Network spreading the league's good word as if it were biblical revelation, is not the only one who's noticed.

"Michigan was one thing," Finebaum said of the Wolverines' 2023 title. "Ohio State [in 2024]. But then Indiana. Nobody down here respects Indiana."

They may be starting to, especially after the Hoosiers' 38-3 clubbing of Alabama in the College Football Playoff Rose Bowl quarterfinal. A school from the county seat of Monroe County, Indiana, buzz-sawing its way to a national championship through the Crimson Tide was a helmet slap for the entire SEC.

"That to me was the Waterloo," Finebaum added. "Watching that destruction. Watching Alabama players quit in the fourth quarter. I've never encountered anything like that."

Other cracks are showing.

When the Big Ten's USC finished with the nation's No. 1 recruiting class in 2026 per 247Sports, that ended a run of 18 years with SEC schools holding the No. 1 spotin that ranking.

The SEC just finished with its all-time worst single-season bowl record at 2-8. The conference was favored to win seven of the 10 games (not counting the head-to-head matchup between Oklahoma and Alabama in the playoff ).

In 2024, SMU - in its first year in the ACC - was selected to the CFP over Alabama. A case could have been made for and against the Tide after a 9-4 season, but the fact that SMU - which had spent almost four decades wandering in the wilderness outside power conference football - made such an impression on the selection committee was significant.

Not surprisingly, the pressure to win in the SEC has never been more intense. Since the beginning of 2022, nine of 16 schools have changed coaches at least once. In one two-day period last year (Nov. 30-Dec. 1), six SEC schools announced new football coaches. In Saban's 17 seasons at Alabama, the other SEC schools hired 54 different coaches.

The guy to follow the guy, Kalen DeBoer, has yet to fully prove himself at Alabama. Brian Kelly didn't get it done at LSU. Lane Kiffin had sure as hell better. Steve Sarkisian has to win a championship at some point at Texas to be considered a success in Austin, doesn't he? Florida and Auburn continue to struggle. Ryan Silverfield is Arkansas' third head coach since 2019.

And it may be a while before the SEC's prestige is restored. It's hard to find an SEC team in Vegas with a projected double-digit win total in 2026. Georgia and Texas are typically the leaders in that category at 9.5.

Also, the decision to add a ninth conference game means that half the league is guaranteed to have an extra loss beginning this season. No wonder some SEC types are ready to junk the championship game.

It just means more.

Finebaum joked on the air last summer that if the Big Ten won another title, he was going to leave the country. "A lot of people took me seriously," he said.

He stayed in the country, but his eyes widened.

"It's got some historical feeling about it," Finebaum said of the current state of the SEC. "How could this happen to us?"

For one, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti happened. The 65-year-old son of a New York City cop is a TV guy. He came up as a sports executive at CBS, ABC and Major League Baseball. His best college experience was programming college football, not watching the parade go by.

He's an innovator for whom bigger is better. Petitti secured Oregon and Washington in the last round of expansion. He floated the idea of Big Ten play-in games for the playoff. His 24-team playoff model that was circulated in the offseason makes too much sense.

That idea is also in direct conflict with his peer, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey. The ongoing King Kong-vs.-Godzilla battle for the sport's levers of power continues.

Jim Harbaugh also happened.

The Big Ten's rise and the SEC's slide both occurred about the same time that legal player compensation started.

Michigan's quirky coach embraced NIL in 2023. Not surprisingly, that same year Harbs survived questions about his job security and won it all in his ninth season with the Wolverines. Pay no attention to his treading all over the NCAA rulebook amid multiple scandals and suspensions to get to the top.

Most telling, Harbaugh sledgehammered home a style that had been perfected by the SEC. Physical. Conservative. Dominant at the line of scrimmage. Almost boring when it was all clicking. Devastating when Michigan football became an SEC doppelgänger.

Ryan Day also happened. In 2024, Ohio State had to mentally recover from a crippling loss to Michigan in order to win it all. In the space of seven weeks, the Buckeyes' head coach went from whispers of being let go to national champion. He remains the game's winningest active coach.

In 2024, Curt Cignetti came out of nowhere. (OK, technically, he came from James Madison.) It can be sensibly argued that Indiana's success caused a nationwide panic beyond the SEC with administrators everywhere asking, "Why can't we do that?"

Why, indeed? It can be argued the SEC began its current downturn on Jan. 10, 2024, the day Nick Saban retired. That moment was always going to come for the greatest college coach of all time as he eased into his 70s. But when it did, it was still a shock to the SEC's soul.

Saban's brilliance in recruiting, player development and strategy was unmatched. His influence is scattered all over the game in the form of scores of assistants who learned at his feet.

But Saban had tired of the NIL landscape. And unfortunately, there was no one to replace him. Not yet. Not at that level.

The Big Ten has pulled off a lightning-fast renovation. Once mocked for its slow, plodding style of play, the league - at least at the top - has taken over the game.

A year after tying its own record of 15 first-round NFL Draft picks in 2025, the SEC has lost its draft domination. Ohio State alone had more top-11 picks (four) than the entire SEC combined (one).

After not having a quarterback go No. 1 overall in the draft since 1990 (Jeff George, Illinois), the conference has now produced a No. 1 pick at the position. In April, Indiana's Fernando Mendoza was the No. 1 overall pick of the Las Vegas Raiders.

The SEC is in the midst of its longest championship drought since 1999-2002. We are long since past the point of asking what went wrong in the SEC and how to fix it.

Everything in college football is cyclical, from style of play to style of polo shirts worn by assistants. What we are witnessing is something more significant. College athletics is in a period of peak disruption.

The urgency and ability to acquire plug-and-play transfers are at odds with the timeworn - and, some believe, time-sucking - practice of developing high school talent. The likes of Indiana, Ohio State and Michigan have maintained roster consistency better than anyone lately.

Meanwhile, the SEC is chasing a legacy instead of creating one. With six championships at Alabama - a record seven overall, including at LSU in 2003 - Saban created a standard that can't be matched. Anywhere. That was a different era.

The most popular term these days is "alignment" - where coach, AD and president all agree on the mission, money and moxie it takes to make it all work. As a result, in a sport that has never embraced underdogs, the portal and NIL have brought a form of parity that never existed in college football. Vanderbilt stuck a foot in the door. James Madison and Tulane got to the College Football Playoff. Hired less than three months apart, Indiana's Curt Cignetti (football) and Michigan's Dusty May (basketball) each took their programs from the bottom of the Big Ten to a national championship in two years on the job.

The SEC's current situation crystallized in late 2023 when an Alabama staffer turned to me in the run-up to that season's CFP semifinal Rose Bowl against Michigan. "We've only got one billionaire in Alabama," he complained. "They've got seven at [the University of] Texas."

A few days later, Saban coached his last game.

"Adapt or die," Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian has repeatedly said of the current landscape.

Michigan adapted during the summer of 2024. The program realized it had to get into the NIL game after 5-star quarterback Bryce Underwood had committed to LSU.

It (eventually) became unacceptable to Michigan that Underwood, from nearby Belleville, Michigan, would leave for the SEC, especially with the Wolverines needing a quarterback. Billionaire Michigan alum Larry Ellison then reportedly ponied up $10 million for Underwood.

While not a big donor at the beginning of the Cignetti era, Mark Cuban has become another Big Ten billionaire who fuels his alma mater's fortunes.

"I really jumped in because how [Cignetti] approaches building a program. They weren't about, ‘OK, give me enough money to win the portal,'" Cuban told CBS Sports HQ. "He had a very specific approach to his culture. … He said, ‘I want production, not future, not potential.'"

Ohio State paid a reported $20 million for the roster that won the 2024 title. That figure is now outdated. We head into the 2026 season with the top programs paying $50 million to assemble a top-shelf roster.

Is the SEC all in? Is it heresy to even ask that question? LSU certainly pushed all its chips to the middle of the Death Valley playing surface. It blatantly went after Kiffin, the self-described "Portal King," while he was leading Ole Miss to a playoff berth. Ethics, hurt feelings and financial constraints be damned.

Remember way back four years ago when Tennessee threw $8 million at quarterback Nico Iamaleava? Hey, nobody said then or now that any of the numbers make sense.

After winning back-to-back national titles in 2021-22, Georgia hasn't advanced past the CFP quarterfinals, even while winning the 2025 SEC title. Sorry, but that's a net decline in Athens.

Whoever replaced Saban wasn't going to measure up. To many always-rational Bama fans - sarcasm tag added - DeBoer certainly hasn't, despite a playoff appearance in his second season.

"There is still an arrogance [among SEC fans]," Finebaum said. "Alabama fans are probably having the hardest time."

Parity has allowed any program to get players from anywhere as long as the fit, alignment and money are right. Ohio State enticed Alabama freshman All-America safety Caleb Downs to transfer after Saban retired. May's starting five at Michigan were all transfers.

What the Big Ten has been able to do lately is bridge the mysterious gap between player compensation and success on the field.

"You still need great coaching," Petitti told Front Office Sports. "You still need a commitment to winning, and performing at the high level, coming together, and building and developing players. I don't think that's ever going to change."

The Big Ten, born in a downtown Chicago hotel in 1896, has always been the richest conference. Bigger markets, deeper pockets, bigger alumni bases than anyone else.

It didn't matter very much until the late 1980s, when media rights revenue became an advantage to be exploited. The Big Ten was the first conference to expand in the modern era after the deregulation of college football television when Penn State joined in 1990 (PSU football began conference play in 1993). Former SEC commissioner Roy Kramer followed suit, adding South Carolina and Arkansas in 1992.

The power at the top of college athletics is now consolidated in 34 schools - 18 in the Big Ten, 16 in the SEC. In its latest financial statement, the SEC distributed a record $1.03 billion ($72.4 million per school). The Big Ten, whose figures hadn't been released at press time, was expected to distribute $1.2 billion ($75 million per school). The Big Ten is expected to be paying $100 million per school at the end of its current media rights deal early in the next decade.

You can see where this is headed - a rivalry decided with ruthless hits on the field and monstrous balance sheets off of it.

For the moment, advantage Big Ten. For the first time in the modern age, the league has weaponized its financial advantage.

"A lot of the schools in the Southeastern Conference don't have that kind of old-time generational wealth," Saban said last year.

An SEC lapse was bound to happen. Simple statistical theory states there will always be a regression to the mean. College football wouldn't always be tipped in the SEC's favor. Thirteen championships in 17 years were unprecedented. A confluence of media, coaching, recruiting, player development and fortune has shifted in the Big Ten's favor.

The relationship remains complicated because the leagues are both rivals and partners. They control the size and structure of the playoff on their own. Last year, the rest of the FBS acquiesced to the SEC and Big Ten getting an annual revenue share of 29% of the CFP.

Forget debating whether that was fair or not. It just was. The FBS can't field a legitimate playoff without the two mega-conferences. The SEC and Big Ten have made it clear that they could stage their own 34-team playoff.

"How do we work with colleagues to solve problems? Can we do that collectively?" Sankey said on Finebaum's show in March. "If there's a point at which we cannot do so, I think the conversation that informs the question that you ask, ‘Is there something you'd do alone?' I think that starts to generate more and more interest."

Yikes. As much as they are going at each other's throats, whatever happens in the future of college athletics is going to be manipulated/guided by the SEC and Big Ten.

So how does the SEC regain its primacy? Win more playoff games for sure. Crack that NIL code. Find the next Mendoza. Gosh, it's been almost three years since the SEC won a Heisman. Maybe keep Kiffin away from a keyboard.

Maybe look more like … Indiana?

Written by Dennis Dodd. Follow him on X at @dennisdoddcbs. This article appeared in Athlon Sports' 2026 College Football Preview Magazine. Purchase a copy in our online store.

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This story was originally published July 15, 2026 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Analysis | How the SEC lost its grip on college football as the Big Ten has taken over."