SEC Is Already The Biggest Loser Of CFB Playoff First Round

We've had only two games completed in the 2025-2026 College Football Playoff thus far, and they've proven one inescapable thing: the SEC superiority arguments need to end. Yesterday.

Everyone who follows college football is familiar with how it goes. Talk to most SEC fans or boosters and within minutes, they'll trot out a favored and oft-repeated line. *Insert SEC team here* "would go undefeated in any other conference!!!" Or the flip side, "Force any other team to play an SEC schedule and they'd lose every game!!!"

This isn't even some fringe thing either; ESPN's Paul Finebaum quite literally made a version of that argument to justify Notre Dame being excluded from the playoff this year. 

It's an absurdity that doesn't hold up to even the slightest scrutiny. Yet it continues today, on message boards, social media and in emails to authors who dare to criticize the conference's sense of superiority. It'd be one thing if it were limited to those areas. But it isn't. These arguments are made by the most influential personalities in and around the sport. 

They're made by coaches like Lane Kiffin. By the majority of ESPN personalities, who use their platforms to promote the SEC. And they're even made by the selection committee, which put Alabama into the playoff despite an atrocious performance against Georgia in the SEC Championship game. Why? Because simply making the game, to them, was the highest possible accomplishment that simply could not be punished.

Well, Friday's Alabama-Oklahoma game and Saturday's Miami Hurricanes win over the Texas A&M Aggies need to end all of it. Forever.

COLLEGE STATION, Texas - Texas A&;M Aggies quarterback Marcel Reed (10) is sacked by Miami Hurricanes defensive lineman Rueben Bain Jr. (4) during the second half of the first round game of the CFP National Playoff at Kyle Field on Dec. 20, 2025. Photo: Jerome Miron-Imagn Images

SEC Results Don't Match The Endless Hype and Hypotheticals

The Alabama-Oklahoma game obviously pitted two SEC teams against each other. So how could it undermine the SEC superiority arguments? Because it was an awful game, played by two teams that looked far, far, from invincible. Oklahoma's punter literally dropped the ball on one play, handing Alabama free points. The two teams combined averaged about 1.4 yards per carry. Alabama had four first downs in the first half and was tied 17-17, because Sooners quarterback John Mateer threw one of the worst passes you'll ever see for an easy pick-six.

RELATED: OU-Alabama Was Awful Football From Two Teams That Aren't Playoff Caliber

It was awful. The type of game that would have led to endless criticism from ESPN and SEC fans, had it matched up teams from a different conference.

Then there's Saturday's Miami-Texas A&M game. 

The Aggies are well known for having some of the best fan and crowd support of any program in the country. Kyle Field was filled with an overcapacity crowd, with 104,000+ in College Station. They went 7-1 in the SEC and 11-1 overall. They were tiebreakers away from reaching the SEC Championship game. Lane Kiffin, just a few weeks ago, made a passionate case that A&M should be the number one team in the country because they were, at the time, perceived to be the best team in the SEC. 

Well. In a weekend of things not aging well, that aged about as poorly as anything. 

Texas A&M was awful against Miami. The Aggies scored three points, at home, against an ACC team that had a questionable case to reach the playoff at all. This is exactly the type of game the SEC is hypothetically undefeated in, and A&M was lucky to even be in the game at all. 

Miami missed three field goals. The Aggies averaged a woeful 4.3 yards per play. At home. Against an ACC team. That ACC team averaged 5.7 yards per play and 6.2 yards per run against an SEC defensive line. Aggies quarterback Marcel Reed saw Mateer's performance against Bama and found a way to one up it. 

Halfway through the 3rd quarter, Reed threw an interception on a pass that was at least 10 yards behind his intended target. 

The game finished on another terrible Reed throw, well underneath his wide receiver, that was intercepted in the end zone. 

Does this mean the Aggies shouldn't have made the playoff? No, of course not. They deserved to make it. But the implicit assumption that simply playing in the SEC means team X is better than team Y is obviously not remotely accurate. That's the assumption that the college football world has been operating on. For years. Mostly because of the success of Alabama and Georgia. 

But the results of 2017 or even 2021 aren't particularly relevant in the new world of NIL. The gap between teams and conferences has shrunk, dramatically. The SEC doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt, just because of its conference patch. That's precisely what it got from the selection committee. 

Not next year.