Every year college football fans love to debate the sport\u2019s top conference top-to-bottom, even if that conversation usually tends to focus on the Big Ten vs. the SEC. But, at least according to one well-known ESPN pundit, the SEC stands alone this season, and it\u2019s not up for debate.<\/p>\n
During the question-and-answer portion of Monday\u2019s Nonstop podcast<\/a>, ESPN college football experts Kirk Herbstreit and Joey Galloway engaged in just such a debate, only this time the discussion centered around whether the Big Ten was more comparable to the ACC than the SEC this season. <\/p>\n \u201cTo me the ACC and the Big Ten are way more comparable than the Big Ten and the SEC,\u201d Galloway, a former Ohio State receiver, said Monday on the Nonstop podcast with Herbstreit<\/a>. \u201cThat would be an actual comparable.\u201d<\/p>\n Galloway\u2019s bold claim sparked a back-and-forth with Herbstreit, a fellow Buckeyes alum who seemed shocked by such a suggestion.<\/p>\n \u201cWow,\u201d Herbstreit repeated several times. \u201cI\u2019m not going to let that one go by. Holy smokes.\u201d<\/p>\n Herbstreit went on to describe the ACC as \u201cpoo\u201d given many of the conference\u2019s traditional powers \u2014 Clemson<\/a>, Florida State<\/a> and Virginia Tech<\/a> \u2014 currently sit in the bottom half of the league with either overall losing records or a losing conference mark.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m talking top-to-bottom, these last two weeks, the ACC just disappeared,\u201d Herbstreit continued. \u201cYou take Clemson and Florida State out of the ACC discussion, and I still look at Virginia Tech as a traditional power and they haven\u2019t been in years, but if you took three of the faces of that conference when it was put together are (now) below .500. That\u2019s like taking Ohio State, Penn State<\/a> and Michigan<\/a> and making them all irrelevant. I think the Big Ten is closer to the SEC than the ACC.\u201d<\/p>\n But while the Big Ten\u2019s traditional powers \u2014 at least Ohio State and Michigan \u2014 are still among six conference teams currently ranked in the Top 25, with the undefeated Buckeyes at No. 1 overall, Galloway cited the back-half of the league for bringing down his perception of the entire conference.<\/p>\n Similarly to the ACC, the Big Ten currently has seven teams with either losing overall records or losing conference marks, including six programs with five or more conference losses already: Rutgers<\/a> (5-5, 2-5); Maryland<\/a> (4-5, 1-5); Wisconsin<\/a> (3-6, 1-5); Michigan State<\/a> (3-6, 0-6); Penn State (3-6, 0-6); and Purdue<\/a> (2-8, 0-7). Meanwhile, by comparison, only five of the SEC\u2019s 16 teams have overall losing records, while nine SEC teams were ranked in the College Football Playoff\u2018s initial Top 25 released last Tuesday night. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not saying they\u2019re on par (with the SEC) this year, but that\u2019s a strong statement from you,\u201d Herbstreit said.<\/p>\n \u201cEh,\u201d Galloway replied. \u201cJust this season, \u2026 I think they\u2019re closer (to the ACC), just because the bottom-half of the Big Ten is not great.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every year college football fans love to debate the sport\u2019s top conference top-to-bottom, even if that conversation usually…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":285842,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[399,150690,398,396,397,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-285841","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-joey-galloway","10":"tag-ncaa","11":"tag-ncaa-football","12":"tag-ncaafootball","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285841\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/285842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}