Desert Sapper's Blogistan

Look, unless every single time a team in your conference takes the field against a team from another conference, you don't have a claim to 'best conference in the universe' or whatever the claim is.  ALL of the major conferences are good.  They all have good-great teams (depending on the year).  They all have bottom-feeding crappy teams.  They all have middle of the road teams.  If one conference has more teams in bowl games or more wins in bowl games, I can almost guarantee it is by the slimmest of margins. 

I suppose this argument is aimed mostly at the SEC.  If there were truly a conference of uber-teams (as SEC fans claim their conference to be), everybody in the league would be 6-6 at the end of the year.  Everybody in the SEC can't win the SEC, or everybody would have an SEC championship.  When was the last time either Mississippi won a championship of any kind?  How about Vandy, South Carolina, or Arkansas?  The answer to the last two questions is Ole Miss in 1963 (Mississippi State last won in 1941) and never.  If anything, the Big 10, with only two schools - Indiana and Minnesota - not winning a title since 1967, has a better claim to greatness on that account.  Every team in that conference has at least won 2.  You can point to a different team winning the championship every year since 2004, which proves what exactly?  That different teams got hot in those years, but no one team has proved to be dominant?  You can point to no team winning back to back since Tennessee from '97-'98.  Hell, you could talk about the bowl games this year.  I don't care.  I'm just sick of conference smack.  To all the lower tier teams in the SEC:  No, your team is not great simply for playing in the SEC.  No, the SEC is not the NFL.  No, a top team from the other conferences would not finish 6-6 in the SEC.  So shut up.  Your team is just as much of a bottom feeder as Stanford, Baylor, Syracuse, Northwestern, or Duke (okay, well, maybe not quite Duke).  Some of those teams have actually won their conference recently.

 So who do I think is the #1 conference?  As the title implies, I don't.  There is no #1 conference in America trophy (other than that BS thing that ESPN hands out, and I'm relatively certain the MWC won that thing this year).  LSU was the #1 team, because they beat Ohio State.  Does that make the SEC a better conference?  No.  Not any more than Mizzou beating Arkansas (a team that beat LSU in Baton Rouge, mind you) by 31 points makes the Big XII a better conference.  Not any more than unranked Michigan beating 9th ranked Florida by 6 (and should have been more) makes the Big 10 a better conference. 

Some teams are better than others.  That's where the conversation should be.  Conference smack is for the birds.