Non-Danny Kanell SEC takeaways from the SEC’s disappointing bowl season ...Middle East

If your entire takeaway from the SEC‘s bowl season is “2-7,” well, you’re probably Danny Kanell or a DK disciple who scours the internet for anti-SEC narratives to support. Whatever the case, the SEC going 2-7 vs. other conferences in bowl games has made for a disappointing postseason for the conference, and many have taken notice.

Even if Ole Miss goes on to win a national title — something that has the longest odds of the 4 remaining teams at +570 (via FanDuel) — we’re still talking about a 4-7 mark for the SEC this postseason. Also, 3 of those wins would be from Ole Miss and 1 of them would be for Texas, who faced a Michigan team with a fired head coach with roughly a dozen players absent in the Citrus Bowl. Make of that what you will.

What anyone can take from this postseason is that it hasn’t exactly been a time in which chants of “S-E-C! S-E-C!” have been heard. Flexing has been nonexistent from the conference who has done the most of that in the 21st century. There’s not 1 specific reason for that, though there have been plenty of non-Kanell takeaways from the SEC’s disappointing postseason:

"There needs to be an evaluation of this narrative of the SEC is these big, bad motherf*ckers, because they’re getting their asses whipped in these games.” t.co/fPdeWWgCyf

To be fair, opt-outs impacted all of those games, some more than ever. That’s not to say that “SEC teams weren’t motivated,” but for many of those games, it was a different set of circumstances than what we saw in the regular season. Some SEC teams should’ve benefitted from that, and some probably shouldn’t have. Either way, 2-7 is 2-7.

Not to put lipstick on a pig here, but it’s also probably worth noting that 5 of those 7 losses were by 1 score. That’s not including Mississippi State, who lost by 14 in the Mayo Bowl that nobody wanted to play in after it trailed by 7 with 2:16 to play. Indiana destroying Alabama was the only real example of a true bowl beatdown of an SEC team, though that’s perhaps the best place to examine the more macro issue facing the SEC that Bruce Feldman pointed out in that column. The sport has changed, and it’s fair to wonder if the SEC contenders were knocked down a peg for it.

If Ole Miss loses to Miami, it’ll mark 3 consecutive years without an SEC team in the national championship

That hasn’t happened since 1999-2002. As it stands, Alabama and Georgia have 1 combined semifinal appearance in the last 3 seasons, which is significant when you remember that they’ve won every SEC title in the 2020s. Ergo, this is the third consecutive season in which the SEC Championship winner failed to play in a national championship. From 2006-22, the SEC Championship winner played in the BCS/College Football Playoff National Championship all but once (2014 Alabama).

At this point, that’s not nothing. So does it mean the conference is nothing more than a hype machine? There are some other takeaways from the way that things have played out within the SEC this bowl season.

Let’s get to them:

Diego Pavia getting silenced by Iowa feels like the SEC’s postseason in a nutshell

To be clear, Pavia was lights out in the second half against Iowa. It was shades of his Texas performance, which still came up short after a sleepy start. The Vandy defense allowing 34 points to Iowa certainly wasn’t on Pavia, though when you say before the season “you gotta score 7 points to beat Iowa,” yeah, that’s gonna come back to bite you in a 34-27 loss.

Diego Pavia: “You gotta score 7 points to beat Iowa”Proceeds to lose 34-27 to Iowa pic.twitter.com/JDaM3HgGw0

You sure about that? pic.twitter.com/X9HeplzpPC

Of course Iowa was going to clown Pavia for that after he was as vocal as anyone that the SEC was a cut above the competition. The Heisman runner-up had all the motivation to finish his college career with a bang, and instead, he couldn’t keep pace with the Iowa offense that he mocked.

(The Hawkeyes averaged 6.4 yards per play against Vandy, and if we’re being honest, it should’ve been 37 or 41 points if not for a horrendous decision to throw the ball on 1st-and-goal from the Vandy 4-yard line, which resulted in an interception. It felt like the college football gods were telling Iowa “how dare you briefly forget who you are in this all-important matchup for conference narratives.”)

It was a bad look, and while plenty of SEC fans would like to disassociate with all things Pavia, he was still the best player in the conference this year. The fact that Pavia, AKA the conference’s most accomplished and polarizing player of 2025, was part of the SEC’s ugly postseason only added to the narrative that the conference was overhyped.

But was it really overhyped?

The “2-7” anti-SEC crowd is conveniently leaving out the other piece of data

Like, records vs. Power Conference foes in nonconference play. Entering the postseason, here’s what those looked like:

That played a massive part in the SEC getting 5 Playoff bids. And yeah, 2 SEC Playoff teams were eliminated by virtue of getting matched up vs. one another, though those wins and losses didn’t count for or against the conference’s postseason numbers.

I know that an ACC fan who watched the conference go 3-0 vs. the SEC in bowl season would like that to be the only piece of data. It’s not. At the same time, the ACC has had a heck of a postseason in ways that the SEC did not. It needed to because when you’re entering Year 6 of the decade and you’re still searching for your first New Year’s 6/Playoff victory — they had lost all of those games by double digits — you’re desperate. Thankfully for the ACC, Miami ended that drought with a thrilling Round 1 win at Texas A&M and teams like Virginia beat Mizzou while Wake Forest got all the Mayo against 5-win Mississippi State.

Call me crazy, but I tend to think that nonconference play matters, too. We can get into whether it matters more than the current iteration of a postseason wherein the conference with the most NFL Draft picks in each of the last 19 years is probably most susceptible to bowl opt-outs, but let’s not make excuses to conventiently negate results. Instead, let’s do this. Combine the records vs. Power Conference foes in nonconference play with the postseason records.

Here’s what those look like (through Jan. 5):

It’s unpopular to say “every conference sort of finished closer to one another than anybody realized.” That doesn’t confirm narratives, though. Unless Ole Miss wins a national title, the Big 12 will finish with a better nonconference record vs. Power Conference foes than the SEC. At the same time, the Big 12 was a 1-bid league who watched its dominant conference champ get shutout in its lone Playoff game. Also, the Big 12 went 1-3 vs. the SEC this year with the lone win coming via Houston earning a 3-point win vs. LSU and the scraps of the Brian Kelly era. Whether Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark admits it or not, the Big 12 would trade places with the SEC’s 2025 in a heartbeat.

The Big Ten? Not so much. The conference has the 2 favorites to win it all heading into the semifinals, and if Indiana or Oregon do end up being the last team standing, the conference will have produced a unique national title winner in the last 3 seasons. That’s SEC stuff. Hence, why the Big Ten has had some SEC-like bravado the last couple years.

But want to know what’s crazy? The SEC could still have the last laugh on the Big Ten this season

Wait, what? How is that possible? Didn’t I watch Bret Bielema’s squad hold on to the ball for roughly the last 45 minutes of that win vs. Tennessee? And have I already forgotten about Pavia’s embarrassment vs. Iowa and that historical beatdown that Indiana dropped on Alabama?

All of that is hay in the barn. As it stands, the Big Ten’s record vs. the SEC in the 2025 season is 4-3. Perhaps that’s where the number will finish and the Oregon-Indiana winner will face Miami for a national title.

But despite this brutal postseason, the SEC can improve to 4-4 vs. the Big Ten in the 2025 season with an Ole Miss national title victory. And if that happens, well, tie goes to the conference that produces the national title winner.

That wouldn’t be the obvious takeaway from that result playing out, and maybe it shouldn’t be. After all, the Big Ten has held the title of “most dominant conference” in the eyes of the public, even though the nonconference wins vs. Power Conference foes were somewhat underwhelming outside of Ohio State’s 14-7 win vs. Texas. It held that title because it was believed to have 3 title contenders instead of 1 for the SEC while the ACC and Big 12 were merely hoping for their lone representatives to make a run.

The SEC’s hopes of sweeping an embarrassing postseason under the rug now hinges on Ole Miss, AKA the team who has never even been to an SEC Championship. It hinges on the team who watched its head coach leave in hopes of finding a national championship path elsewhere, and it hinges on a quarterback who was playing Division II football in Big Ten country in 2024.

Weird? You bet. Then again, we’re living in a world in which Indiana is the national championship favorite after a quarterfinal round beatdown of Alabama in the Rose Bowl. “Weird” doesn’t even begin to describe reality in 2025. Well, I suppose weirdness carried over into 2026. Perhaps at this point, nothing would be weirder than Ole Miss pulling off as unlikely of a national championship run as any in the 21st century. Alternatively, the SEC’s postseason will end with the conference in a weird, desperate spot in ways that it hasn’t experienced since the 21st century began.

Something tells me that the “2-7” crowd will have something to say (or not say) about that when the postseason concludes.

Non-Danny Kanell SEC takeaways from the SEC’s disappointing bowl season Saturday Down South.

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