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Read MoreSEC Bias? What Do the Facts Say? by Scott Plez (Senior Dixieland Correspondent)
SEC Bias? What Do the Facts Say?
Writing for Pencil Storm, the brainchild of Midwestern musical legend and Ohio State superfan Colin Gawel, I feel pretty sure this piece will be read largely by Big Ten loyalists, many of whom have been loudly complaining about alleged “SEC bias” in the media and in the polls for years. Therefore, I shall begin with a full disclosure of my football allegiance: I am an Auburn fan and damn proud of it. Doesn’t matter to me if the Tigers go 12 and 0 or 0 and 12. I have been known to complain about our defense on occasion, but you’ll never get me to say a bad word in print about the Auburn football program. Never.
But—
That doesn’t make me a shill for the SEC. In fact, I really couldn’t care less about the conference. When the bowls come around every year (contests I still think of as more or less exhibitions, even with the advent of the playoff system), people will often assume I root for all of the SEC teams because I am an “SEC fan.” Far from it. I don’t care whether Mississippi State or Texas A&M wins or loses as long as they’re not playing Auburn. Same goes for Kentucky and LSU and Georgia and most of the league.
I may watch Ole Miss in the Weedeater Bowl or South Carolina in the GalleryFurniture.com Bowl, but that’s only because I love football so much. Bowl season is just the last chance to see college ball for eight long months. I am not rooting for another SEC triumph when I watch those games. In fact, on the occasions when I do care about the outcome of an SEC bowl game, it’s almost always because I want a team from the league to lose. As an Auburn fan, I shouldn’t have to say it, but I will state for the record that I always want Alabama to go down in a flaming heap. (Big thanks to the Buckeyes, by the way!) Even if a Bama victory would somehow help Auburn, I don’t think I could bring myself to pull for the Tide. Same goes for Tennessee. And to a lesser degree Florida. To me, the SEC has one team I love, three teams I hate, and ten other teams I’m vaguely aware of.
So—
If you read what I’m about to write and say to yourself, “Oh, Plez is just another SEC homer,” you are plain, dead wrong. I may not be able to convince you of that, but it’s true. In the fall of the year, my life may be consumed by SEC football, but it makes no difference to me where the SEC ranks against the other conferences. I only really care where Auburn ranks within the league. And most of the year, I don’t even care about that exactly. I’m only concerned with where we rank in the western division of the SEC. Beyond that, I don’t give a hoot about the conference we play in. If Auburn moved to the ACC or the Big 12 (fat chance, but if), I would suddenly start buying preview magazines for our new conference and I’d cancel my subscription to the SEC Network in a hot second. Believe it.
Get what I’m saying? I have no loyalty to the SEC whatsoever.
However—
I do have some loyalty to the truth, and I have to say that all of this talk of SEC bias is just false. Demonstrably false. A lot of people like to believe in grand conspiracies of various types, but like most conspiracy theories, there really just isn’t much evidence out there to support this one. Think about it logically for a moment. If the media conglomerates and the polls were really interested in scheming to make sure a certain conference always came out on top, do you really think they would choose the SEC? SEC schools tend to be in small southern towns. Hell, a few of them (Auburn and Alabama included) don’t even have commercial airports. You want to fly to Auburn? Your best choice is probably Atlanta—over 100 miles away and in a different state.
If the media were smart, you’d think they would plan their conspiracy so that a conference with truly big market teams would get the advantage. How about the Pac 12? They play in places like Seattle and Salt Lake City. Oh yeah, and they have not one but two teams in Los freaking Angeles, with a metro population of roughly eighteen million. Fewer than 60,000 people live in Auburn. Fewer than 100,000 in Tuscaloosa. And Ole Miss (ranked as high as #4 in the College Football Playoff rankings and #3 in the AP rankings this year) is located in Oxford, MS, population about 15,000. The two largest cities in the SEC are Nashville, TN, and Lexington, KY, home of the two perennial bottom dwellers in the league, Vanderbilt and Kentucky.
And it’s not just the Pac 12 that has bigger markets than the SEC. Big Ten universities and cities are bigger (on average) than their SEC counterparts, too. Columbus, OH, is large, y’all, especially when compared to anywhere in SEC land. The Big Twelve Conference has two cities (Austin and Ft. Worth) approaching a million in population. The ACC is based in places like Miami, Pittsburgh, the Raleigh-Durham area, and Atlanta, the city with the biggest metropolitan area in the football-obsessed south. Seems like Georgia Tech would be getting more of that media love (especially with so much of the media based in Atlanta) if the people running this alleged conspiracy knew anything about marketing.
I can’t imagine why the media would deliberately design this conspiracy so as to avoid some of the biggest television markets in the country. But if that argument doesn’t persuade you, how about some good old facts to solidify my case? Can do.
Football is a sport, not a popularity contest, right? We’re told that teams need to “prove it on the field” and that polls don’t mean anything, and I couldn’t agree more. The winning team—more often than not—is the better team. Therefore—stay with me here because we’re getting to the core of it—the conference that has done the most winning over the years is the best conference, no? I think that’s the one inescapable truth that puts the lie to all of this conspiracy talk. The SEC isn’t the best because the conference has been voted to be the best or because they get more media coverage or because the playoff system was designed to favor them. The SEC is the best because they flat out win more games than any other league.
And that is not my interpretation. Nor is it a result of media bias.
It is a simple fact. Or rather, a collection of facts that all lead to the same conclusion. (Please note: The records below include all of this year’s regular season and bowl games, but not the National Championship Game because it hasn’t been played yet as of this writing.)
I think it’s fair to say that the title of “best conference in college football” is going to wind up being claimed by one of the “Power Five” conferences: ACC, Big Ten, Big Twelve, Pac 12, and SEC. So let’s look at the long-term data on inter-conference matchups among these leagues. The SEC has a 61.3% all-time winning percentage (524-308-23) against the other four major conferences. The Big Ten is next with a 50.3% winning percentage (598-561-30) in inter-league play. None of the other major conferences has a winning percentage in such games. The ACC comes in at just 36.1% (261-448-13). The Pac 12 has an all-time record of 452-464-25 (48.0%), and the Big 12 is just behind at 427-481-27 (45.7%). Seems like the SEC has done a good bit more to “prove it on the field” than any of the other conferences, no? And the media didn’t play a single down in any of those games!
“But,” you may ask, “what about bowl games?” OK, true, the bowls are traditionally thought of as the place where conferences prove themselves. And yes, the SEC had some notable losses in this year’s bowl season. With twelve teams in the “post-season” (a term I think only loosely applies in college football), the SEC went 7-5, with five of those losses by teams in the much-heralded SEC West, including my beloved Auburn Tigers, who lost in overtime to a resurgent Wisconsin team. (I pause now to re-stiffen my upper lip and wipe away a tear.)
And yes, those SEC West losses were embarrassing ones in some cases, such as TCU’s demolition of Ole Miss and an LSU heartbreak in a squeaker against a Notre Dame team that had been struggling late in the season. And more importantly, those losses came in some of the biggest bowl games of the year, including most notably Bama’s loss to Ohio State in the semi-final game at this year’s Sugar Bowl. (And I want to reiterate my heartfelt thanks for that one!) The overall results were very disappointing for the league office, I’m sure, but the SEC still came away with a winning record (58.3%).
Let’s put this season’s SEC losses into a larger perspective, then. A winning percentage of nearly 60% puts the league in second place among the major conferences. The plain truth is that the SEC didn’t do that badly this year in the bowls. The losses just came at some bad times.
Over the last 25 seasons, the SEC has had by far the best winning percentage among Power Five conferences in bowl games. Winning 113 games and losing 73 in that span, the SEC has compiled a 60.8% winning percentage. Compare that to the other leagues:
Pac 12: 72-69 (51.1%)
Big 12: 79-79 (50.0%)
ACC: 77-83-1 (47.8%)
Big 10: 74-94-1 (43.8%)
By winning 58.3% of its bowl games this year, the SEC is (gasp) right where they always have been, statistically speaking.
So here are two conclusions for you to consider, and these are based on facts, not on wild speculation and conjecture, but facts:
One: The SEC’s dominance is real, not a myth, not a result of polls and media coverage that follow the orders of some shadowy football overlords executing a grand conspiracy. Not a result, that is, of “SEC bias,” but a simple fact proven by the league’s performance on the field over time.
Two: Despite all of this talk of the SEC falling apart in the bowl season, there’s no reason to declare the SEC king dead just yet. In fact, the SEC seems to be doing about as well as ever.
I know some people will balk at the above conclusions, but if you do, just know this: The facts do not support your case.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I know why people hate the SEC. They hate the SEC for the same reason I hate the New York Yankees. As an Atlanta Braves fan and a supporter generally of the National League, I’m just sick and tired and getting beaten by the freakin’ Yankees and seeing them smugly hoisting trophies over their heads.
But c’mon, the Yankees haven’t won 27 championships because the media was biased in their favor. They have won because they have a powerful and well-built organization with a hell of a lot of money behind it. They have won because, year after year, they manage to get players that are a little bit better than those on the other teams. And like the SEC, the Yankees play in a very competitive environment, so they don’t always win it all, but over time, the win more games and more pennants than anybody else. Even in a bad year for them in 2014, they finished second in their division and had a winning record.
That’s how the SEC operates, too. They just recruit better players and put more time, money, and effort into the sport than the other leagues do. The gap between the SEC and the other conferences isn’t always enormous, and in some seasons, there is no gap to be found, but over time, you can count on the SEC to be the Yankees of college football conferences.
I don’t say that with pride. I just say it with the facts behind me.
Now, please, if you want to end the SEC’s irritating dominance of college football, get out on that field and do what Ohio State just did: Knock the king off the top of the mountain. As long as you’re not beating Auburn, I’m ok with that. And if you beat Alabama or Tennessee, I’ll probably offer to buy you a beer to show my heartfelt gratitude. But until the other conferences start winning like the SEC does, quit blubbering about this mythical SEC bias that has no basis in fact.
It’s sad to hear that kind of loser talk coming from Big 10 country, and I know the good, hard-working people of the Midwest are better than that.
--Scott Plez
Why I'd Be Rooting for Portugal (if I cared, that is) by Scott Plez
Why I’d Be Rooting for Portugal (if I cared, that is)
--by Scott Plez
Here’s the truth that I should state right up front: I hate soccer. Always have and probably always will. On the day that the U.S. was playing Ghana in both teams’ first game in the group stage of the World Cup, I said to a soccer-loving friend of mine that I wouldn’t be watching. Why? Because, I said, if soccer was a sport I could bring myself to care about, a U.S. vs. Ghana game wouldn’t be considered a contest at all. In any sport that I could respect, the U.S. would always be a big-time favorite against a country like Ghana, but soccer’s not like that. It’s a game where we have to sweat games against places like Costa Rica and Honduras. Any sport like that wasn’t worth watching, I said, and he took that reason as some sort of flag-waving, America-first comment, but really, I didn't mean it that way at all. In fact, I routinely root for "the other team" against the U.S. in lots of team sports precisely because I love the story of the underdog beating the behemoth. We’re all pretty much suckers for scrappy underdogs that beat the arrogant team that comes in expecting to win, aren’t we?
Bear with me now for an instructive little detour back to the more familiar world of football—American football, that is. I don’t follow the pros much, but I sure do love some college ball, and I'm a pretty obsessive Auburn fan. (War Eagle!) And in case you don’t know much about the Auburn vs. Alabama rivalry in the annual Iron Bowl game, let me give you a quick primer on the subject. Most Auburn fans actually kind of love being in second place in the state behind the University of Alabama because that means when we beat the big guys from Tuscaloosa, the win is even sweeter. When they beat us, they usually just breathe a sigh of relief. When we beat them, it's most often a howl of jubilation. And yes, I know that Auburn is itself a football powerhouse compared to most teams, but the only team we truly care about beating every year is Bama, the true Gargantua of college football.
All of the other games can be cancelled for all I care as long as we can play that one. And if we win only three Iron Bowls every decade, I'm ok with that. I DON'T want to be Bama. I'd rather lose ten rivalry games in a row than become Bama. And most Auburn fans--whether they would admit it or not—prefer for us to be the underdog who beats Bama than to be SEC champs or even national champs. I think it would be harder to find a fan base less upset about losing the national championship game than Auburn fans were when the Tigers lost to the Seminoles of Florida State back in early January. Why? Because we’d not only already beaten Bama, but we’d beaten them in just about the most devastating way possible when Chris Davis famously ran an attempted last-second field goal back 109 yards. They had a better team than Auburn. They had a Heisman trophy candidate at quarterback. They had been the favorites for the national championship all year and ranked number one for much of the season. But we won that game. And in doing so, we took away what Bama fans think of as almost a birthright: the championship of the state of Alabama.
Bottom line: Winning is sweetest when it’s unexpected. Tyson beating Buster Douglas would barely be a footnote in the history of boxing now. But Douglas beating Tyson? That’s a story.
Anyway, that's my long way of explaining that I do not relish being in the overdog position. In fact, I would rather be a fan of the underdog, and I don’t think I’m all that unusual in that. So the reason I don't like soccer has nothing to do with the fact that I don’t get to wear my American flag t-shirt and put my number one finger in the air as they win game after game. I would not suddenly become a big fan if we became a soccer power. That ain't it. I'm not that kind of fan. In 2012, Auburn went 3-9 and lost every SEC game. Didn’t matter to me. I would still have put twenty bucks on the Tigers come Iron Bowl day, if anyone had been willing to take that action.
Here's what I meant:
For the last 30 years or so, we have been putting one heck of a lot of resources into becoming an international soccer power, right? Youth leagues and Olympic development squads and all that have been trying to develop talent here. And it's become a very popular sport among young people. And we really do try. So with all of the money and all of the millions of hours we have collectively been spending on the sport, an industrialized power like the United States should have be able to become pretty darn great at this game in thirty years of trying. And we have, kind of, but we really should have been able to do better than we have. Remember, we put people on the moon less than ten years after saying we would. We should be able to become a world power in any team sport we decide to.
And like I said, we kind of are. I mean, we did qualify for the 2014 World Cup tournament, which is a big accomplishment in soccer, no doubt about it. Every four years, there are over 200 teams trying to qualify for 32 spots in the World Cup. Each team that gets there has to win or at least do very well in their particular confederation. Ours is called CONCACAF (not exactly the most euphonious of names), and our confederation gets three or four representatives in the World Cup. With 41 members in CONCACAF, just getting to the World Cup tournament is a big deal.
But really, why should it ever be a question of whether we will qualify for this tournament? We will have to qualify for the 2016 Olympics in basketball, too, by playing in a pre-Olympic tournament in our region, but can you imagine we will have any trouble getting there? You think there’s any chance we won’t qualify for the next World Baseball Classic? We won’t always win it, but there’s just no doubt we’ll get in. But in soccer, just qualifying for the world championship tournament is a big deal. It’s actually in doubt whether we’ll get in against competition from the likes of Aruba and Grenada.
To me—and I’m absolutely certain that soccer fans would disagree 100%—the fact that a superpower like the United States has to sweat qualifying for an international competition in ANY team sport suggests not that something's wrong with us or that we lack commitment to the sport, but that something's wrong with the sport itself. What kind of randomness is going on in that sport when we can't at least expect to qualify for the world championship tournament? I don't mean we should always be expected to win it, but shouldn’t we at least feel assured that we could qualify for the event? And when we get to the opening round of that event, I do hope we can expect to get by Luxembourg, should they be unlucky enough to draw the mighty United States of America.
Imagine if we were worried about whether we could beat Suriname so that we could guarantee a spot in the world basketball championship. Or if we got by Suriname to win our way into the tournament, only to find ourselves up against the formidable foe of Uzebekistan, who comes into the game a ten-point favorite. Never gonna happen. We may not always win the gold, but we're going to be a world power in basketball no matter how low we go in the sport. We used to routinely win the gold with a bunch of college players who got pulled together into a team only a few weeks before the Olympics. After we started using NBA players, we starting thinking—and rightly so—that we would probably never “lose” the gold, as if it was assumed to be ours. But then, when we ONLY got a bronze in the 2004 Athens Olympics in basketball, we went nuts and said never again. We got Coach K. in there and have won gold at both Olympics since then. Now I suppose we’re back to assuming that gold medal belongs to us, and that’s why I always root for Nigeria or Singapore to shock the hell out of Lebron and company.
A small country beating us in a team sport should be a shocker. I may sound like a little culturally insensitive for saying so, but yes, it should be a big story when we can't dispatch with Guatemala in any team sport. But I base that statement on arithmetic, not on cultural supremacy. We have over 300 million people living here compared to about fifteen million in Guatemala. And our GDP is roughly 1000 times larger. Which country do you think has a better chance of producing a good team in any sport it cares about? But I looked it up. Back on June 12 of 2012, Guatemala darn near beat us in a tie game that ended 1-1. Imagine that.
And in any other sport, I would wish they had beaten the U.S., because that should be a great story. But it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal in soccer because the scoring is so random that, in any given game, you might as well not call any team a favorite. Now, I'm sure this is not true when you talk about teams at different levels of competition. The United States national team is going to beat the best high school team in the country by a score of about 50-0. I get that. But at the same level of competition, any given game might as well be flipping coins.
Now, baseball can be that way, too, in any given game, but that's why they play 162 games in a season and seven game series in the post-season. The New York Yankees are NEVER going to lose to a local American Legion team, and they'd probably only lose about one out of fifteen or twenty to a good college team, but they are only going to win maybe six times out of ten against the last-place team in the American League East. But when you play that team nineteen times in a year, the odds start to be stacked a little bit in favor of the slightly better team.
But World Cup soccer, which seems at least as random and chaotic as baseball, isn't played in series. They play one game to decide who's better: the USA or Ghana. After a three-game round robin group round, the top 16 teams out of 32 are put into one-game knockout rounds.
Golf can also be kind of chaotic on any given stroke or hole. You get a good bounce here or an unlucky gust of wind here and there, and on any given stroke, you and I might just have a chance at hitting a better shot or making a better putt than Tiger Woods. But that’s why you play eighteen holes, not just one. And in a big tournament, you do that for four days in a row. So at the end of that time, after 72 holes and about 280 strokes for the top players, it's highly unlikely that anyone but the best golfers in the tournament are going to be at the top of the leaderboard.
Not so with World Cup soccer. I didn't watch the game against Ghana, but I saw the next day that the U.S. won on one of those corner-kick-and-header plays very late in the game. So I guess with that header, we proved we're better than Ghana. But if that shot had instead hit the post, it would have been a tie. I know a game in any sport can be decided on a narrow margins like that—for example, in the amazing 109 yard botched-field-goal-gets-run-back play I mentioned above—but in sports that I care most about, those moment are special precisely because they are not the routine thing. Most football games are won by a couple of touchdowns, and you usually much know who's going to win by halftime—and often before the kickoff even. I mean, Appalachian St. is just not going to beat Michigan very often. You can feel pretty safe penciling in a W for the Wolverines when they take on any Southern Conference team. Hell, you could just risk it and use a pen. And that's how it should be. It's the fact that most outcomes are expected and predictable that makes a dramatic outcome dramatic. If they're all dramatic, to me, that's not drama, that's chaos.
That's why, if soccer were a sport I could care about, the United States would have been expected to walk all over Ghana. And that's why, if it were a game I cared enough about to watch, I'd be rooting for Portugal in the upcoming match.
But I don’t. So for now I say go Team America! Win enough to make me respect soccer, and maybe I’ll care enough to root for the other team.
--
Scott Plez (rhymes with hot fez) is a retired motocross champion who is perhaps most well-known for issuing an open challenge to Gene Simmons for a million-dollar skins game of miniature golf. In his free time, Plez engages in high-risk ukulele stunts and reads Archie comics. His goal in Plez-Splanations is to inspire others to speak freely and think even more so. Plez's greatest disappointment in life is that he was not chosen as Malcolm Young's replacement in AC/DC, a move the band must now recognize is the greatest tactical error in their 40-plus year career. War Eagle!