Colin Cowherd may enjoy bashing the SEC a little too much.
Cowherd was at it again earlier this week on his radio show, suggesting that the SEC is "officially not the best conference anymore."
"If you look... don't count last year. We're coming off a 10-12 year run of Southern football dominance. The SEC dominated... It's over, and the South doesn't want to admit it's over."
Cowherd's reasoning for why SEC dominance is over? Coaching hires by the conference over the past few years.
"You still have players everywhere, but you are the worst coached major conference. You have 10 coordinators masquerading as head coaches..."
"For 10 years we lived in a world where the SEC won the national title, they won seven out of 10 bowls, had the most first-round picks and you sorta knew in these out-of-conference early games to hold on for dear life because it could get ugly fast. Now, SEC teams are underdogs in a lot of these out-of-conference games. The SEC will probably win one or two, but the reign is over until the SEC decides to go back and hire world-class football coaches. They had them and let them go. Urban Meyer, James Franklin. Let them go. Les Miles, Mark Richt. See what Mark is doing in Miami with recruiting? Until they decide to give the big boy jobs to the big boys instead of coordinators and posers, this is what happens."
On the surface, this is actually a great point. The middle-tier SEC teams have been cycling through coaches like crazy recently, and it hasn't been to any benefit for the conference. That said, it is still amazing how much Cowherd still misses on a softball of a talking point.
Is Vanderbilt at fault for letting James Franklin "go" to Penn State? Heck, remember when Franklin was on the hot seat at Penn State before the Nittany Lions took down Ohio State and jettisoned up the rankings? That was a real thing!
Richt did the exact same recruiting at Georgia that he is doing at Miami and got zero national titles out of it, and zero SEC titles in the 10 seasons leading up to his dismissal. Recruiting has been a slight improvement so far with Richt at Miami, but until there are definitive results, that's not much to go on.
If Les Miles was a world class coach, he wouldn't be looking at TV jobs right now. And don't forgot, LSU got rid of him in September of last year, so he's had plenty of time to find a job.
Cowherd has some points... if he were pointing to a decline in the SEC and not outright saying the conference is no longer dominant after one year.
The SEC has been college football's premier conference for the past decade. It's going to take more than one down season — where Alabama was still a few seconds away from a title, anyways — to say that the SEC still isn't in that position.
