Mission Impossible: The OTS Response

A Sea Of Blue, one of the best Kentucky blogs around, had a very good article the other day entitled, "Mission Impossible: Growing a football program in the SEC."At bottom, the article details the perils of building a football program up in the SEC, coming to the conclusion that for a program like Kentucky, it's almost impossible to turn into a legitimate and consistent winner.

I must say, it's pretty hard for me to disagree with much of what they say. Granted, for the Kentucky faithful, it's a bitter pill to swallow, but bitter pills generally contain large granules of truth, so it is what it is.

And Sea of Blue is correct, it's a nearly impossible task for a lower tier SEC program. The level of competition in this conference is so ridiculously high that it is the athletic equivalent of scaling Everest with nothing but a Snickers bar and a Swiss Army knife.

Just think of the great quality teams in this conference. Alabama is the traditional powerhouse, and we arguably have the greatest tradition in all of college football. Tennessee is a traditional powerhouse, and one of the top ten great programs of all-time. Even teams like LSU, Georgia, and Auburn are generally considered as top fifteen programs, historically speaking. Florida traditionally hasn't been a powerhouse, but truthfully they have been the premier program in the SEC over the course of the past twenty years. If that is not hard enough, now throw in a historically good Arkansas program, and a steadily-rising South Carolina program.

The thing about the SEC is that it is so competitive from top-to-bottom. In the other conferences, it is generally a couple of schools at the top that win basically everything, and the rest are generally middling at best. The Big Ten has Ohio State and Michigan. The new ACC has Miami and Florida State (not so much now, but no one doubts that will be who dominates that conference once they get things together). The Big 12 has Oklahoma, Texas, and Nebraska. The Pac-10 has USC. The old Big East had Miami. The old ACC had Florida State. The old Big Eight had Oklahoma and Nebraska (as Bosworth put it, "The Big Two and the Little Six").

Break it down over the past several years.

In the Big Ten, either Michigan or Ohio State have won a share of the Big Ten championship in nine of the past eleven years.

In the Big 12, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas have combined to win the Big 12 championship in seven of the past ten years. Moreover, one of the those three teams have appeared in the Big 12 Championship Game each and every year since its inception in 1996.

In the Pac-10, USC has won the conference championship the past five years in a row, and just being honest, with as much talent as they have, it will almost certainly be six in a row this year. Projecting that even further -- again, with all of the talent they have -- they could easily run off seven or even eight straight conference championships.

The SEC is very different. In the past nine years, eight different teams have appeared in the SEC Championship Game, and six different teams have won the SEC championship.

At bottom, the parity in this conference is just so high that going into any year, a large number of teams could win the SEC. As we've written about in the past, it's just damn near impossible to predict the eventual SEC champion, and that is due to the extremely high amount of parity to be found within the conference. Take LSU for example. They are likely to have a great team this year, and they are everyone's favorite to win the conference. But seriously, what are the chances that they actually get it done? Honestly, if I had to say, I'd probably say 25% or less. And that's nothing against LSU mind you, they are a great team, but the rest of the conference is just so tough and the least little slip-up will cost you the title. Hence why an pre-season SEC favorite hasn't won the SEC since Tennessee in 1997.

It's just a murderer's row, no two ways about it.

And keep in mind I'm not bragging here, and I'm not trying to start one of those god-awful "best" conference debates. I'm merely pointing out that the level of competition in this conference is so high that it is going to be almost impossible for a team like Kentucky or Vanderbilt to turn into a consistent winner.

Take a look at Arkansas, for example. Before the Hogs joined the SEC in 1992, they were one of the better football programs in the nation. They had won the old Southwest Conference thirteen times, and had winning records against every Southwest Conference team except Texas. From 1936-1989, they finished ranked in the final poll 25 times. Since moving to the SEC in 1992, however, things have not gone well for the Hogs. They have yet to win the SEC, and really haven't even gotten particularly close. Beyond that, in the fifteen years prior to their joining the SEC, the Hogs had five seasons of ten or more wins, but in the fifteen years since joining the SEC, they only have one. Moreover, they have losing records against several SEC foes since joining the conference (Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, etc.), and have only been ranked in the final poll three times in the fifteen years since making the switch, compared to nine times in the previous fifteen years.

Even for one of nation's better programs, it is a tough road filled with peril. I can only imagine what it must feel like for those who bleed blue and white.

It's just these schools have everything against them. They are generally light years behind in terms of facilities, and really there's just no feasible way for them to catch up. Moreover, they can't replicate the tradition bit, and players who are looking for a quick-ticket to the NFL will not be headed to their campuses. Beyond that, they generally don't have the big bucks to pay the best coaches, so even if they hire a good coach they usually just use the school as a stepping stone, and many of these schools (Kentucky is a good example) are simply not in geographic areas where ungodly amounts of the football talent comes out of the high school ranks each year.

Just look at what these schools have to do in order to get a little talent. What little in-state talent there is grows up with little or no attachment to that particular school and thus it often leaves the state for greener pastures (see Shaun Alexander of Florence, Kentucky). So what are those schools to do? Obviously, recruiting out-of-state talent away from far superior programs who grew up bleeding their state school's colors just doesn't happen very often. So, at the end of the day, they just aren't left with very much talent, and it shows up on Saturdays.

And if you think this is just an SEC phenomenon, you are wrong. It's really true of all of the big conferences, honestly. Can Stanford really ever consistently run with the big dogs of the Pac-10? The same goes for teams like Baylor, Purdue, Kentucky, and others. They may have some success on occasion, but it is generally a one or two year stretch followed by years and years of below mediocrity.

All in all, despite all of the major rule changes by the NCAA in the name of parity and increasing competition over the past several decades, generally speaking, it's still a college football world divided between the haves and the have-nots. On the one hand you have the powerhouses with the almost endless resources, the magnificent facilities, the massive stadiums, the diehard fanbases, the talent-rich recruiting bases, and on the other hand you have those programs who, well, don't have any of that. And the results essentially show that.

At bottom, I think I would have to agree wholeheartedly with their conclusion. I'm just really not convinced that most of these programs, almost regardless of what they do, can really ever turn into consistent competitors in the true powerhouse conferences, particularly in the SEC.