Gets me fired up and not in a good way? I keep hearing all this talk about how the SEC might not be the top dog anymore. People point to Indiana winning it all last year and Oregon loadiing up through the portal and they start wondering if the rest of the country has caught up. Let me tell you something, I have been watching this league since the days when Georgia and Auburn would slug it out in the Deep South's Oldest Rivalry and the whole season came down to who wanted it more in the fourth quarter. The SEC is still the conference where you earn every single yard and every single win. You cannot tell me that some of these other programs understand what it means to go through a full SEC schedule week after week. It wears you down, it builds character, and it separates the pretenders from the real contenders.
I remember back in the early 80s when we would play Florida in Jacksonville and that game alone would decide who went to the Sugar Bowl. Those Gator teams under Coach Pell were nasty, they hit you in the mouth and you had to hit back harder. That is what made this conference special. Now you got programs like Colorado bringing in 43 transfers in one offseason and people act like that is the same thing as building a program the right way. It is not. You cannot manufacture chemistry in one spring practice. You cannot buy the kind of toughness that comes from going through four years of SEC battles. The portal has made it so kids can just pack up and leave the first time things get hard instead of grinding through it and coming out stronger on the other side.
I do not care what the national narrative says about parity or the Big Ten catching up or whatever else the talking heads on ESPN want to push. Until somebody from outside the SEC can g...