Outside of Alabama, the SEC hasn't been quite as strong in recent years, and Lane Kiffin said Nick Saban is to blame.
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Kiffin told Fox Sports' Stewart Mandel that the SEC was a much deeper and stronger league in 2009 when Kiffin was the head coach at Tennessee than when he joined Alabama in 2014.
"I don't claim to be the best historian of the SEC," Kiffin said. "But I have a hard time imagining there was ever a stronger roster of players and coaches on all the teams then when we got to the SEC (in '09).
"(At Tennessee), every week when you went to game plan, there was a dominant, dynamic player in the front seven you had to game plan around. That's very rare. When I came back the second time, the first year (in 2014), there were still good coaches and similar kind of players, though not quite as strong."
Kiffin said Nick Saban's dominance in recruiting caused the rest of the league to suffer.
"It was clear that what Nick Saban was doing the previous three to four years, just dominating recruiting, had changed the conference," Kiffin said. "Defensive players, they all want to go to Alabama. Even if you have to wait a year or two to play, you know you're going to go out and have a chance to play in the NFL.
We'd go to play last year, and we knew that no matter what, when we walked onto that field, our roster was more talented than every team we played. If you accumulate all of the (best recruits), now you're not playing against them."
From 2006-2010, four different SEC teams won national titles. Florida won two ('06, '08), LSU won one ('07), Alabama won one ('09) and Auburn won one ('10). Since then, Alabama has won three titles ('11, '12, '15), and only Auburn has even appeared in another title game ('13).
(h/t 247Sports)
