College football’s orbit has shifted, and the south no longer reigns supreme. Indiana’s victory in the National Championship game on Monday night now means that the Midwest has won three championships in a row, and more specifically the Big Ten is has firmly dethroned the SEC as the kings of college football.
Beyond the triumvirate of Michigan, Ohio State, and now Indiana becoming champions — the landscape of college football is littered with Midwestern dominance. Notre Dame has made the playoff three times and was this year’s biggest snub, and even Cincinnati has made one appearance. Meanwhile the South’s place in the playoffs has been dominated purely by Alabama, Clemson, and Georgia — with everyone else from the south lagging far, far behind.
Try as they might to claim Texas and Oklahoma, Texas and Oklahoma aren’t the south. Stop kidding yourselves. Just as we aren’t going to call Washington or Oregon part of the “Midwest,” simply because they’re in the Big Ten now.
What we’re seeing in college football is that democratization of process has caused the SEC, and the South as a whole to fall by the wayside. Gone are the majority of bagman deals and shady recruiting processes that were only talked about in hushed tones on message boards. NIL has ushered in an era where everyone has their chips on the table for all to see, and we’re quickly learning that the south can’t hang. They’re stuck in stuffy, old thinking, tired strategy, and more time is invested in whining about NIL and boosters, than trying to hang with the competition.
The Midwest’s dominance is running through every level of the sport right now.
It might be a small sample size, but since playoff expansion in 2024-25 the SEC is getting absolutely bodied when more teams were added to the fray. The Big Ten’s overall playoff record the last two years is 9-3 (0.750), while the SEC is a horrific 2-7 (0.222). If that doesn’t say something to recruits, I don’t know what does — and more dangerously it’s being coupled with an NFL Draft reality that the SEC is no longer an easy ticket to the league. Trait based scouting has eclipsed coaching lineage or program legacy, which used to be an easy way for players to get drafted, and why we had so many busts as a result.
College football moves through the Midwest until evidence proves otherwise. The biggest recruits are heading there, the transfer portal is sending talent up to the Big Ten, while the SEC is on the back foot for the first time in the modern era. The allure and romance of the Southeastern Conference as we knew it is dead, and it’s for this reason that we see so much complaining coming out of the likes of Alabama about the NIL structure. The edge is gone, the playing field has been equalized, and the South has been found wanting.
It’s a new world, and the SEC needs to adapt.
