Why Does the SEC Win So Many National Championships?

While there have been many SEC Championship Games where the national championship was on the line as well as the SEC title, dating all the way back to the first one 20 years ago, for three of the last five years it has served as a national championship semifinal - win and you're in.  While credit must be given to former SEC Commissioner Roy Kramer for adding Arkansas and South Carolina to the conference, initiating the divisional split, and creating the SEC Championship Game, one must also remember that the title game itself isn't what has made the SEC the premier conference in America.  In contrast to the SEC Game, the Big XII Championship Game was viewed by its conference as a failure during its 15-year run, largely because the Big XII game took as many national contenders out of the title game as it helped put in.

The SEC Championship Game winner has gone on to win the national championship nine times in its 20-year history, while Alabama won an additional title last year without playing in the game.  Looking back on that 20-year period though, the SEC has won seven of the last nine national titles, which means that in the previous 13 years, the conference only won three.  Three titles in thirteen years is nothing to sneeze at - I assure you that any other conference would be ecstatic to achieve that number at this point.  So what accounts for the unbelievable run over the last nine years?  Is there any chance that things will change?

While it is inevitable that a team outside the SEC will eventually win the title again, I think that there are a few factors that will continue to favor the SEC in the future, and account for the epic run of late.  First, the SEC Championship Game is a factor.  In the old SEC system (before the title game was created), Alabama, Georgia and Florida would all tie for the 2012 conference championship.  Alabama, by virtue of the highest ranking in the BCS, would likely get a berth in the national chmapionship game, but it would be a controversial one, since the Tide did not play either Georgia or Florida in the regular season.  The SEC title game ensures that the best teams in both divisions play each other, which adds legitimacy to the SEC champion.

The second factor is the affiliation that the SEC has with CBS and ESPN.  While it has been eclipsed subsequently, the 2008 contract that the SEC signed with ESPN was the largest conference television deal at that point, a $2 billion agreement that has allowed every conference game of any significance at all to appear on television.  Other major conferences have similar arrangements, but only the Big Ten currently makes more revenue per school (as a result of the Big Ten Network), and a true SEC Network is in the works.  In addition, unlike some conferences, the SEC shares revenue equally among its members, so that traditional powers aren't favored financially by the conference office or the television partners.

The third factor is coaching.  While the conference has always had great coaches, Alabama's hiring of Nick Saban in 2007 set a new bar for coaching salaries and expectations.  Saban is still the highest-paid coach in the country, but until a few minutes ago, the conference had four of the ten most highly-compensated coaches in the nation (Gene Chizik was just sent out to pasture).  With those high salaries come high expectations.  Four SEC teams are looking for coaches today, while four others have coaches in their first or second year.  The tendency two or three decades ago in the SEC was largely to hire offensive or defensive coordinators with SEC experience to be head coaches, but head coaching, championship or recruiting experience has trended upward while SEC experience has diminished.  The need to "hit a home run" with each coaching hire and the impatience with losing means that only two coaches (Mark Richt and Gary Pinkel) in the conference have been with their team more than a decade, and Missouri's only been an SEC team for six months.

The fourth factor is talent.  Five of the top ten states in overall number of football recruits are within the SEC footprint (1-Texas, 2-Florida, 4-Georgia, 7-Alabama, and 8-Louisiana), with another four in the top 20, and that's not to mention other Southern and near-Southern states like North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland also in the top 20.  Football recruits generally stay close enough to home for their parents to be able to see them play, and the fact is that, while these numbers fluctuate somewhat, there are as many Divison I recruits in the 2013 class in the eleven states of the SEC as there are in the other 40 (including D.C.).  Growth trends in the South would indicate that those numbers are only going to become more pronounced.

Finally, and this is a hard thing to put a finger on, but I'm going to try, the fifth factor is tradition.  Tradition can be defined in a number of different ways, but specifically, I am referring to a tradition of winning.  It may not surprise you, but over the 14 years of the BCS, eleven different teams have won a national title.  That would seem to indicate that the championship is relatively democratic.  However, each of those eleven teams is ranked in the top 20 in all-time winning percentage (the lowest-ranked team, Auburn, is 18th).  Even if you go back to the first year of the SEC title game, the number of different winners only increases to thirteen, and the two additional teams are also top 20 powers.  In fact, since 1970, only five teams have won the national title that are not in the top 20 in all-time winning percentage: Colorado and Georgia Tech in 1990, BYU in 1984, Clemson in 1981 and Pittsburgh in 1976.  All of these teams, by the way, are in the top 40.  That's not going to change this year either, since Notre Dame, Alabama and Georgia are all in the top 15.  Look at the national title winners since 1992, the first year of the SEC Championship Game:

Alabama, Florida, Nebraska - 3 titles
Florida State, LSU, USC - 2 titles
Auburn, Miami, Michigan, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas - 1 title

Now conference affiliations have changed for Nebraska and Miami since they won titles, but let's look at the number of teams per conference, using today's affiliations, that have won the national title.

SEC - Five teams
Big Ten - Three teams
ACC and Big XII - Two teams
Pac-12 - One team

So, five different SEC teams have won the national title since 1992.  That number is still five if you just count from the beginning of the BCS era (1998).

SEC - Five teams
Big XII - Two teams
ACC, Big Ten, Pac-12 - One team

So what's my point?  The Southeastern Conference has six teams in the top 20 in all-time winning percentage, more than any other conference.  Georgia is the only one of those teams that hasn't won the title in the last 20 years.  The Big Ten is the next closest conference with four, although two of those were added within the last two decades.  No other conference has more than two.  Since we've already established that traditional powers, by and large, win national championships, it stands to reason that having more traditional powers means winning more championships.  Why do traditional powers have such an advantage?  That could probably be the basis of a more serious study, but I think elements like money, facilities, fan support and expectations, name recognition, media focus, and recruiting all play a part.  However, there can be no argument that the national championship club is an exclusive one.

So, while the SEC's winning streak won't last forever, all the factors I've outlined give the SEC a competitive advantage that the other conferences on the whole can't duplicate.