An intense debate has sparked within the last three years over which conference rules college football.
The SEC was the unquestioned No. 1 conference from 2006-22; Florida, LSU, Alabama, Auburn and Georgia all took home at least one national title in that period.
However, national championship victories by Michigan, Ohio State and Indiana have the anti-SEC crowd proclaiming the conference’s downfall while arguing for the Big Ten as the sport’s strongest conference.
Seven-time national champion head coach and current ESPN College GameDay analyst Nick Saban weighed in on the debate during a recent edition of ESPN’s “Get Up.”
Saban emphasized the value of a conference’s depth over the strength of its top powers in his defense of the SEC.
“First of all, whoever wins a national championship doesn’t define who has the best conference. I think the best conference gets defined by how many good teams you have from top to bottom, and I think the SEC has a lot of good teams from top to bottom,” Saban said. “Last year, we had five teams in the playoff in the SEC, which says there’s pretty good depth in this league.”
One of the best ways to assess a conference’s depth is to examine the strength of the teams toward the bottom of the league. Arkansas and Purdue both finished 2025 at 2-10 overall, but one was far more competitive in its losses than the other.
Six of the Razorbacks’ 10 losses in 2025 were by six points or less; they fumbled away potential game-winning drives against Ole Miss and Memphis, turned the ball over on downs on what could have been a game-tying drive against Mississippi State and missed a go-ahead field goal at LSU with five minutes to play in the game.
Purdue fumbled away a potential game-winning drive against Rutgers in the final minute, but its other two one-score losses to Minnesota and Michigan were much longer shots than most of Arkansas’ shortcomings in 2025.
Additionally, the Big Ten’s College Football Playoff participants did not face the same level of competition from the bottom of the conference the way the SEC’s participants did. Indiana and Oregon survived scares at Penn State, but the Nittany Lions finished with a bowl victory.
South Carolina pushed both Alabama and Texas A&M to the limit, the latter of which trailed by 27 points at home to the Gamecocks. Auburn’s offense was dreadful, but its defense made it a tough test for Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma and Texas A&M.
Florida played Georgia tight in its first game after parting ways with Billy Napier, and it cost Texas a spot in the College Football Playoff just weeks before it fired Napier.
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