SEC Football: On the west coast, they just don’t get college football

Life is different on the west coast. Especially in the state of California, it is different in good and bad ways. Putting aside political differences as inappropriate for this platform, we can still say the state of California has some of the best and worst of America.

In many California locales, the landscape is stunningly beautiful. The flip side can be seen in cities where too many people try to live despite water shortages and transportation gridlocks.

Many from the west coast don’t perceive college sports in the way we do in the south. That is particularly true about college football. For that reason, we can forgive them for sometimes not knowing what they’re talking about.

It happened this week with a story published by the Los Angeles Times. The LA Times has a history of hating southern football and particularly SEC football, and specifically Alabama Football. It goes back to segregated teams. Though the decades-old Times’ rancor expressed might have been extreme, its argument was correct. Segregation in every form was inexcusable. Not as a defense of southern failures, but the City of Angels has some sordid history as well.

If that hatred has dissipated into jealousy on the west coast, the jealousy is strong in terms of SEC football. Last week when the proposed, 12-team expansion format failed, it was the result of no votes by the ACC, the Big Ten and the Pac 12. No schools had more to gain from the field growing to 12 teams than the upper echelon of the Pac 12.

There have been 24 CFB Playoff games. Pac 12 teams have participated in two of them. The two teams, Washington and Oregon showed, as Cincinnati did in the recent Playoff, that they had no business competing at the Playoff level.

A Pac 12 team has not made the Playoff field since the 2016 season. Somehow, out in LA, that does not qualify as losing. See the paper’s tweet below.

In the published story, staff writer, J. Brady McCollough made the claim the proposal for 12 teams was nothing more than a power move from which SEC football would gain more power.

McCollough could have just as easily called Greg Sankey a liar. Sankey has repeatedly said the SEC is content with the four-team format.

Apparently, McCollough agrees with two primary points of anti-SEC football sentiment. One point is anything that benefits the SEC is bad for the rest of college football. The other point is the Playoff should not be structured to achieve its original purpose of giving each season’s best teams an opportunity to win a National Championship.

Before calling others losers, McCollough should admit to his apparent motivation to diminish the best league, with the best teams in college football.

As McCollough derisively reminds his readers – in the SEC, more is not just accepted; it is embraced. There is nothing wrong with that.