The release of the first College Football Playoff poll recently was treated with shock, disdain, and outright anger from many fans across the sport. Unless they root for the SEC.
SEC teams were shockingly, and consistently overrepresented and overranked, to the point that prominent rival coaches openly speculated about a connection between ESPN, the SEC, and the committee’s willingness to abandon any pretense of objectivity.
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Defending national champion Curt Cignetti, as one example, was blunt about his perception of the committee’s bias.
Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti paces the sideline as his team plays Nebraska during the first half of an NCAA college football game Saturday, Oct. 10, 2026, in Lincoln, Neb. (AP Photo/Rebecca S. Gratz)
“SEC gets a lot of love from ESPN and all their writers that they don’t technically pay but march to their drum,” he said. “That’s why you see all these SEC teams up there, and some good two-loss teams from the Big Ten not quite as high. But like I said, it’s all going to be played out on the field.”
“Come on. These people, and there’s a whole bunch of them, they march out of the tent, and they’re given instructions on what to say,” he added. “And they follow the company line. Right, and I don’t need to go any further.”
There’s little doubt that the SEC’s marketing efforts have been extremely effective at ensuring voters ignore results and focus on perception instead. And the biggest winner might have been the conference’s most effective marketer: LSU Tigers head coach Lane Kiffin.
Kiffin has been loudly decrying the conference’s move to nine games, correctly realizing that the extra losses , which put the SEC on equal footing with the Big Ten and Big 12, will be tough to overcome when evaluating resumes. To combat this, he’s spent most of the past year campaigning for the benefit of the committee. Saying, incorrectly, that the SEC is Just Different and deserves to be treated like special snowflakes relative to other conferences.
“The conferences are so different,” he said recently. “They are. They’re different stadiums, they’re different environments, they’re different middle to bottom of them. So you’re not playing equal schedules, they’re not even close. If you took an SEC team and gave them another one of those conference’s schedules, they’d average two more wins. Well, that’s a big deal. So, I say all that to say you had to go to more teams, because the system’s broke in how they pick them.”
Pretty much all of that is wrong. But his propaganda efforts, based on the first week’s poll, clearly worked. Losses in the SEC simply don’t matter as much as they should, a trend that was obvious in 2025 when the Alabama Crimson Tide were blown out by Georgia in the conference championship game and didn’t drop a single spot. The committee decided ahead of time that they should be in, so they determined that the SEC Championship Game could only help the winner, and not hurt the loser.
Will that same preferential treatment be given to the loser of a, say, Utah-BYU Big 12 Championship Game? Of course not. Because of the stadiums or something. Returning to Kiffin’s diatribe though, one stat that he curiously never brings up is the SEC’s recent performance when the games actually matter. And unfortunately for him and them, it’s not very good.
Head coach Lane Kiffin of the LSU Tigers in action against the Texas A&M Aggies at Tiger Stadium on September 26, 2026 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (Photo by Gus Stark/LSU/University Images via Getty Images) (Gus Stark/LSU/University Images via Getty Images)
In 2025-2026, the SEC went 1-8 in bowl games. They were 0-3 in the College Football Playoff against non-SEC P4 opponents. Texas A&M went 7-1 in the SEC and was a tiebreaker away from reaching the conference championship game, then scored all of three points against a lowly Miami Hurricanes team at home. In their awe-inspiring temple of an SEC stadium.
Houston beat LSU in their bowl game. Virginia beat Missouri. Illinois beat Tennessee. Iowa beat Vanderbilt. Then Alabama, the team gifted a spot in the playoff thanks to their conference patch, was obliterated by Indiana 38-3 in the Rose Bowl. So two of the top three teams in the SEC, Texas A&M and Alabama, lost their non-SEC playoff games by a combined score of 48-6. Six points combined.
“They’re not even close.” “They’d average two more wins.” And people actually believe this stuff.
Since the expanded playoff format started, SEC teams are 2-5 against other P4 conference teams. They’re 5-7 overall, while the Big Ten is 8-5. “They’re not even close.”
There’s another part of Kiffin’s ridiculous posturing that he never brings up: travel. This isn’t the SEC’s fault, of course, but the conference’s geographic alignment gives them a tremendous advantage over the Big Ten or ACC. LSU is in the Central Time Zone. Of their 12 games, just two were or are scheduled for any other time zone, Kentucky and Tennessee. They already lost to the Wildcats.
USC, by contrast, plays four games in other time zones, including three in the Eastern Time Zone. USC, despite being based in Los Angeles, plays more times in the Eastern Time Zone than LSU does. UCLA has six games in time zones other than its home Pacific time zone. That’s a massive advantage for the Tigers and for most SEC teams. Their travel schedules simply don’t match up to the grueling gauntlet of the Big Ten. Just imagine how many more losses Kiffin and his marketing group would have if they had to travel like their peers. But stadiums or something.
LSU head coach Lane Kiffin reacts during the first half of an NCAA college football game against Mississippi State in Baton Rouge, La., on Saturday, Oct. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton)
This isn’t the first time the SEC boosters have done their fake superiority performance. And yet they learn nothing from it.
December 2024 – Lane Kiffin: “The SEC is just different, it’s totally different. You might as well be in different leagues, not different conferences, different leagues.”
June 2025 – Vanderbilt QB Diego Pavia: “You want to play with the best — you don’t want to play with the Big Ten. … You ignore those calls.”
July 2025 – Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko: “It’s a gauntlet going into the SEC season.”
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October 2025 – Alabama head coach Kalen DeBoer: “This is our third game in a row in the conference against a ranked opponent. That’s life in the SEC.”
October 2025 – Paul Finebaum: “I’d like to see Indiana go through the gauntlet that Alabama has gone through…”
November 2025 – Lane Kiffin: “Texas A&M being [No.] 3 — what more do you want them to do to be [No.] 1?”
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December 2025 – SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey: “I actually think we deserve seven in,” he said referring to the number of SEC teams that should be in the playoff. “I think the seven teams that are in the top-14, half of the top 14 teams are from the SEC. That’s an indication that this league is different, the expectations are different, the competition is different, and the rewards should respect each of those elements.”
December 2025 – Vanderbilt head coach Clark Lea: “This should be about the 12 best teams in the country and a 10-2 team in the SEC … look, obviously we love our league. It just means more here and all that kind of stuff, but there’s a level of respect that needs to be held for the gauntlet we’ve been through and how we’ve met the match and done the things we need to do,” Lea told OutKick. “I mean, it is just absurd the idea that we’re going to open the door to teams that play in conferences that aren’t the SEC that have the same record we have. I mean, it’s crazy.”
December 2025 – Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian: “If you really look at the body of work, and you look at the Southeastern Conference of what we have to go through every week, you look at the non-conference schedule we played, to go to Ohio State in Week 1 and lose by seven when we outgained them by nearly 200 yards—we got a really good football team. It would be a disservice to our sport if this team is not a playoff team when we went and scheduled that non-conference game.”
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December 2025 – Alabama QB Ty Simpson: “In general, we think that… actually we know we have the best offense in the country.”
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This is why it’s so galling that the committee listened to Kiffin and Sankey and Sark and the relentless propaganda: it’s just wrong. It’s been proven wrong. It is not accurate.
Kiffin’s Tigers were blown out by Alabama on Saturday night, to the point where their awe-inspiring stadium was mostly empty halfway through the fourth quarter. Will the committee keep them without shouting distance of the top-12? Or will they do what they would to another team and conference, and drop the Tigers to the bottom of the top 25 or out of it entirely?
This is why Kiffin made these comments, because he hoped that the standards will be lower for him than they are for other schools. Lose three times? It’s because of stadiums or some nonsense. Lose four times? It’s because of Nick Saban in 2015. There can never be consequences for the SEC, because they’re just special.
Kiffin’s right, the system they use to select teams is broken. We’ll just have to see how broken, in his favor, it actually is.
Ian Miller is a writer at OutKick.