Quite a good show that Indiana and Miami put on Monday night, wasn’t it?
It had just about everything, capped by an after-the-fact Heisman moment from Indiana’s
But what if I’d told you 10 years ago that a comfortably favored Indiana team — Indiana, which began the year as the historically worst team in NCAA football history— would hold on to beat a gutsy effort from a scrappy, never-say-die underdog Miami team for the national championship?
Crazy, huh? What year is this? What parallel universe are we in?
More shocking, perhaps, the Southeastern Conference was nowhere to be found for the championship game, let alone the trophy presentation.
Or that the SEC’s best hope disappeared when it was — not Georgia, certainly not Alabama — — but Ole Miss that was beaten a game short of the championship.
It wasn’t a shocker. Or it shouldn’t have been. It was the third straight year the SEC had been AWOL from the big stage.
It also made it (ouch!) three nattys in a row for the Big 10.
The SEC’s retort would be a reminder that, fairly recently, the the league won six in a row (2006-12) and six of eight (2015-22).
Yeah, but what have you done for me lately?
It can’t be as simple as Nick Saban doesn’t live there anymore.
Welcome to the new and strange world of college football.
Just a hunch, but the SEC will be back at some point.
Commissioner Greg Sankey woke up a few years ago and was embarrassed by the sad plight of the league’s basketball.
That sport’s SEC motto has always been — It’s Relatively Important, But Never to be Confused with Football.
He went to work anyway. Conference summits and think-tanks were held. Money was spent.
The result?
Last March Madness the SEC set the record with 14 of its 16 teams getting into the Big Dance, capped by Florida’s national championship.
And it’s entirely possible that the demise of SEC football is as premature as it is overrated.
Forget the SEC’s famous Motto — It Just Means More.
One thing the league is learning in this new age of college football — if it can still be called college — is that, for sure, It Just Costs More.
That shouldn’t be a problem for the SEC.
Cash money just seems to magically appear when the SEC heavyweights are of a mind to spend it.
Take LSU, for instance.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry got a lot of attention when, as the bill came due for Brian Kelly’s firing, he promised to demand more fiscally responsible athletic spending, especially in contracts.
And his state’s Flagship University has been spending money like a drunken sailor ever since, be it for luring new coaches or paying off fired ones, not to mention bigger tabs for players, assistants, analysts, whatever it takes to keep up the Joneses.
Never mind that it’s not coming out of the state’s coffers. Money, whatever magic hole it comes from, won’t be the problem.
You do what you have to do.
Most of the SEC is similarly financed, which is to say they’ll find the money somewhere.
But when the SEC says It Just Means More, it’s about more than money.
More so, it really does just matter more.
As in, the happiness and well-being of entire states being at stake, sometimes even the sense of self-worth.
For now, at least.
The 1-2 punch of the convenient transfer portal, and the ability for its residents to seek the highest bidder, changes things.
It just does — for the players, certainly, and it’s hard to blame them. But, also for the fans.
They live and die with these teams and really like to believe — perhaps naively — that those beloved players, even those who didn’t “grow up dreaming of playing in Tiger Stadium,” are just as loyal to them.
Quarterback T.J. Finley began his career at LSU, even started a game. He transferred to Auburn and, well, this season Incarnate Word will be his seventh different team.
Have arm, will travel.
That’s an extreme example, of course, but college football has become an annual player grab, an offseason game of musical chairs where the bulk of teams can disappear and new and strange names appear.
How are fans supposed to get the warm fuzzies attaching themselves to that?
When it’s all about who wins the annual battle to bring in (and buy) the best hired guns, maybe there’s not as much passion from those players. Or the fans.
In effect, rather than devoted sons of the alma mater out there winning one for the Gipper, fans are supposed to be emotionally attached to hired mercenaries who may or not be there tomorrow at the drop of a C-note.
If the fans stop caring, the game is in trouble.
Bottom line, the SEC can get back to its old strength.
The question — maybe not now but 5-10 years from now — will be if college football as the league once knew it will still be there.
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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics for the American Press. Contact him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com