The recent release of the first College Football Playoff poll was treated with shock, disdain and outright anger from many fans of the sport. Unless they support the SEC.
SEC teams were shockingly consistently overrepresented and outclassed, to the point where prominent rival coaches were openly speculating about a connection between ESPN, the SEC, and the committee’s willingness to abandon any pretense of objectivity.
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Reigning national champion Curt Cignetti, for example, has been blunt about his perception of the committee’s bias.
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Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti stands on the sideline as his team plays Nebraska during the first half of an NCAA college football game Saturday, Oct. 10, 2026, in Lincoln, Neb. (AP Photo/Rebecca S. Gratz)
“SEC gets a lot of love from ESPN and all of their writers because they don’t technically pay but walk their own beat,” he said. “That’s why you see all these SEC teams up there, and some good Big Ten teams with two losses, but not as high. But like I said, it’s all going to come down to the field.”
“Come on. These people, and there’s a whole group of them, come out of the tent and they’re given instructions on what to say,” he added. “And they’re following the company line. That’s true, and I don’t need to go any further.”
There is no doubt that the SEC’s marketing efforts have been extremely effective in ensuring that voters ignore the results and focus instead on perception. And the biggest winner might have been the conference’s most effective marketer: LSU Tigers head coach Lane Kiffin.
Kiffin sharply denounced the conference’s move to nine games, correctly realizing that the additional losses, which put the SEC on equal footing with the Big Ten and Big 12, will be difficult to overcome when evaluating resumes. To combat this, he spent most of the last year campaigning on behalf of the committee. Saying, wrongly, that the SEC is just different and deserves to be treated like special snowflakes compared to other conferences.
“Conferences are so different,” he said recently. “They are. They’re different stadiums, they’re different environments, they’re different from mid to low. So you’re not playing equal schedules, they’re not even close. If you took a team from the SEC and gave them another one of those conference schedules, they would average two more wins. Well, that’s a big deal. So, I say all that to say you had to go to more teams, because the system is broken in the way they select them.
Almost all of this is false. But his propaganda efforts, based on the first week’s poll, have clearly paid off. Losses in the SEC simply don’t matter as much as they should, a trend that was evident in 2025 when the Alabama Crimson Tide were eliminated by Georgia in the conference championship game and didn’t drop any spots. The committee decided in advance that they should participate, so they determined that the SEC Championship Game could only help the winner and not hurt the loser.
Will the same preferential treatment be given to the loser of a Utah-BYU Big 12 championship game, for example? Of course not. Because of the stadiums or something. Getting back to Kiffin’s rant, one statistic he oddly never brings up is the SEC’s recent performance when the games actually count. And unfortunately for him and them, it’s not very good.
Head coach Lane Kiffin of the LSU Tigers in action against the Texas A&M Aggies at Tiger Stadium on September 26, 2026 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (Photo by Gus Stark/LSU/University Images via Getty Images) (Gus Stark/LSU/University Images via Getty Images)
In 2025-26, the SEC went 1-8 in bowl games. They were 0-3 in the College Football Playoff against non-SEC P4 opponents. Texas A&M went 7-1 in the SEC and was one tiebreaker away from reaching the conference championship game, then scored all three points against a lowly Miami Hurricanes team. at home. In their impressive temple of an SEC stadium.
Houston beat LSU in its bowl game. Virginia beat Missouri. Illinois beat Tennessee. Iowa beat Vanderbilt. Then Alabama, the team that had earned a playoff berth thanks to its conference crest, was obliterated by Indiana 38-3 in the Rose Bowl. Thus, two of the top three teams in the SEC, Texas A&M and Alabama, lost their non-SEC playoff games by a combined score of 48-6. Six points combined.
“They’re not even close.” “They would gain an average of two more wins.” And people actually believe these things.
Since the start of the expanded playoff format, SEC teams are 2-5 against other P4 conference teams. They are 5-7 overall, while the Big Ten is 8-5. “They’re not even close.”
There’s another part of Kiffin’s ridiculous posturing that he never mentions: travel. This is of course not the SEC’s fault, but the conference’s geographic alignment gives them a huge advantage over the Big Ten or ACC. LSU is in the Central Time Zone. Of their 12 games, only two were or are scheduled in another time zone, Kentucky and Tennessee. They have already lost to the Wildcats.
USC, on the other hand, plays four games in other time zones, including three in the Eastern Time Zone. USC, despite being based in Los Angeles, plays in the Eastern Time Zone more times than LSU. UCLA has six matches in time zones other than its Pacific time zone. This is a huge advantage for the Tigers and most teams in the SEC. Their travel schedules simply don’t match the grueling challenge of the Big Ten. Imagine how much more loss Kiffin and his marketing group would incur if they had to travel like their peers. But stadiums or something.
LSU head coach Lane Kiffin reacts during the first half of an NCAA college football game against Mississippi State in Baton Rouge, La., Saturday, Oct. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Matthieu Hinton)
This is not the first time that SEC boosters have pulled off their false performance of superiority. And yet, they learn nothing from it.
December 2024 – Lane Kiffin: “The SEC is just different, it’s totally different. Might as well be in different leagues, not different conferences, different leagues.”
June 2025 – Vanderbilt QB Diego Pavia: “You want to play with the best – you don’t want to play with the Big Ten. …You ignore these calls.
July 2025 – Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko: “It’s a challenge going into the SEC season. »
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October 2025 – Alabama head coach Kalen DeBoer: “This is our third straight conference game against a ranked opponent. That’s life in the SEC.”
October 2025 – Paul Finebaum: “I would like to see Indiana meet the challenge that Alabama went through…”
November 2025 – Lane Kiffin: “Texas A&M being (No.) 3 – what more do you want them to do to be (No.) 1?”
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December 2025 – SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey: “I actually think we deserve seven games,” he said, referring to the number of SEC teams expected to make the playoffs. “I think the seven teams that are in the top 14, half of the top 14 teams are from the SEC. That says this league is different, the expectations are different, the competition is different and the awards have to respect each of those things.”
December 2025 – Vanderbilt head coach Clark Lea: “It should be about the top 12 teams in the country and a 10-2 team in the SEC…look, obviously we love our league. “I mean, it’s just absurd the idea that we’re going to open the door to teams that play in conferences other than the SEC and have the same record as us. I mean, it’s crazy.”
December 2025 – Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian: “If you really look at the body of work and you look at the Southeastern Conference of what we have to go through every week, you look at the non-conference schedule that we played, to go to Ohio State in week one and lose by seven when we outgained them by almost 200 yards – we have a very good football team. non-conference play.
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December 2025 – Alabama QB Ty Simpson: “In general, we think…actually, we know we have the best offense in the country.”
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This is why it is so infuriating that the committee listened to Kiffin, Sankey, Sark and the incessant propaganda: it is simply wrong. It turned out to be false. This is not correct.
Kiffin’s Tigers were blown out by Alabama on Saturday night, to the point where their impressive stadium was virtually empty midway through the fourth quarter. Will the committee keep them quietly away from the top 12? Or will they do what they would do with another team and another conference, and leave the Tigers at the bottom of the top 25 or out of it altogether?
This is why Kiffin made these comments, because he hoped the standards would be lower for him than other schools. Lose three times? It’s because of the stadiums or some stupid things. Lose four times? It’s because of Nick Saban in 2015. There can never be consequences for the SEC, because they are just special.
Kiffin is right, the system they use to select teams is flawed. We’ll just have to see how broken it is, in his favor.
Gn sports
