The Life of a Lower-Class SEC Team

It's a tough life for Derek Dooley's Volunteers and other SEC cellar Dwellers

When it comes to college football, most of the time you need to go no further than the Southeastern Conference, a conglomerate of collegiate football teams whose followings could rival their NFL counterparts. Everyone knows the conference's recent history; since the inaugural BCS National Championship in 1998 the SEC has won eight of 14 games and has won the last six contests. The SEC is usually laden with Top-10 teams by season's end and somehow produce three-loss top-ten teams with unusual consistency. Much has been made of the conferences top-tier teams over the past six years of SEC dominance, but little is said about the cellar dwellers, the bottom feeders, the easy wins. So if the SEC so defiantly states it's the conference in college football, then it must be elite from top-to-bottom right?

Every team in the SEC has seen its dog days, and each have seen its glory. Only two years ago Auburn was crowned National Champs, this year it's winless in seven SEC attempts. Florida was a mediocre 7-6 last season, now it's  9-1, ranked sixth in the nation and knocking on the SEC Championship door. Arkansas finished fifth last season after a Cotton Bowl victory, but it has only won two games all season; the Razorbacks were ranked 10th in the preseason polls this year. LSU didn't suffer a defeat last season until the BCS National Championship; it already has two losses this year. The SEC is a jungle, and no one can stay above it.

But over the past few years there's been some consistency in the nation's most brutal conference. Tennessee, Vanderbilt, Kentucky, Ole Miss and Mississippi State haven't been able to get anywhere north of seven wins consistently. Kentucky and Tennessee both haven't won more than seven games since 2007. Mississippi State has won more than seven games only three times and Vanderbilt has only one winning season since the turn of the century. Other than two back-to-back nine-win seasons in '08 and '09, Ole Miss hasn't won more than five games since Eli Manning was under center.

They say that the best NFL prospects come out of the SEC, but when they say "the SEC" do they mean Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Auburn, Arkansas and South Carolina or do they mean the whole entity? Since 2007, 12 first round picks came from SEC teams not previously stated. That's compared to 37 first round picks from the six teams I did just mention. Obviously the NFL scouts respect the elite SEC teams more than the lesser ones, but 12 first round picks from the so-called bottom feeders is pretty damn good. The talent is clearly there, yet it must be tough for lower SEC teams to survive in such a hostile coneference.

Rivalry games like Vanderbilt-Tennessee, Mississippi-Ole Miss and Kentucky-Tennessee are as bitter as they come, but they receive no national attention, no hype beyond the Deep South. So while these lesser teams play out their brutally tough SEC schedules, facing all types of ranked teams, do they wait for these winnable rivalries games to feel a sense of accomplishment? Yeah, there's an upset victory here or there that allows for their fans to storm the field and rip down the goalposts but how do motivate your players when you know that your talented team is nowhere near contention status with the likes of Alabama, Georgia or Florida? How do look at a 6-6 season and feel excited just because you were the tenth best team in the SEC and received a bid to the Independence bowl when you may just have the talent to contend for a title in the ACC or Big 12? The life of a lower-class SEC citizen must be nothing short of brutal.

And so when you laugh at the likes of Vanderbilt and Kentucky whose histories are far from storied, remember that they've kept their mancards by staying in the SEC, where they repeatedly get shellacked not only by some of the nation's best college football teams but some of the greatest college football teams ever.