Is There SEC Dominance In College Sports?
In three of the four big revenue sports, the SEC is riding a multi-year national champions streak. If we just count the national champions in those sports since the start of the 2020-21 school year (post-COVID cancellations), the SEC owns eight of those 12 titles. On Monday night LSU capped off a remarkable baseball season by winning the championship 18-4 over Florida(another SEC team). It's now been five years since any other conference has won a baseball title.
This fall the same can be said in college football, as it will be five years since Clemson rattled Alabama in the 2018 Championship Game. The last two women's college basketball championships have been won by Dawn Staley and her South Carolina Gamecocks and Kim Mulkey and her LSU Tigers this April. As far as men's basketball, well it’s hard to win everything.
In the 2020’s the SEC has been dominant. As across the nation a lot of talk is about how the college sports landscape in headed for the “power two conferences“ between the Big-10 and the SEC, the titles don’t reflect that at all. In the school year of 2022-23 alone the SEC has as many titles (3) as the Big-10 does for this entire 21st century in the big four revenue sports. Six of the SEC’s 14 current programs have won a national title in a big revenue sport since the 2020-21 school year began.
Will NIL and the Transfer Portal Level the Playing Field?
Most believed that the new landscape of college sports with the transfer portal and the NIL would level the playing field. Is it possible that the combination of NIL and the transfer portal has tipped the scales even more in the SEC’s favor? As non-SEC athletes like Angel Reese, Paul Skenes and Tommy White all transfer into the SEC (all to LSU) and helped lead their teams to national titles. Here is a list of all the SEC titles each decade since the 1990’s began: per Saturday Down South.
1990s: 15 (1991 Tennessee women’s basketball, 1991 LSU baseball, 1992 Alabama football, 1993 LSU baseball, 1994 Arkansas men’s basketball, 1996 Kentucky men’s basketball, 1996 Tennessee women’s basketball, 1996 LSU baseball, 1996 Florida football, 1997 Tennessee women’s basketball, 1997 LSU baseball, 1998 Kentucky men’s basketball, 1998 Tennessee women’s basketball, 1998 Tennessee football, 2000 LSU baseball)
2000s: 11 (2003 LSU football, 2006 Florida men’s basketball, 2006 Florida football, 2007 Florida men’s basketball, 2007 Tennessee women’s basketball, 2007 LSU football, 2008 Tennessee women’s basketball, 2008 Florida football, 2009 LSU baseball, 2009 Alabama football, 2010 South Carolina baseball)
2010s: 12 (2010 Auburn football, 2011 South Carolina baseball, 2011 Alabama football, 2012 Kentucky men’s basketball, 2012 Alabama football, 2014 Vanderbilt baseball, 2015 Alabama football, 2017 South Carolina women’s basketball, 2017 Florida baseball, 2017 Alabama football, 2019 Vanderbilt baseball, 2019 LSU football)
2020s (through 2022-23 school year): 8 (2020 Alabama football, 2021 MSU baseball, 2021 Georgia football, 2022 South Carolina women’s basketball, 2022 Ole Miss baseball, 2022 Georgia football, 2023 LSU women’s basketball, 2023 LSU baseball).
In a calendar year the SEC will welcome ESPN and their massive TV rights deal. They will also be welcoming Texas and Oklahoma and their sustained presence on the college sports landscape. Not to mention their added revenue to the already $3 billion ten year TV deal. I am not sure if the SEC can keep the 2.67 out of four big revenue titles pace up the rest of this decade or not, but it’s clear that we are all seeing why the SEC slogan is “it just means more”.
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