The playoff era didn’t really exist. More like the BCS era from 1998-2020 essentially, just one game longer. Once NIL+portal happened, the game changed. We’ve been in a transition phase so far but we are about to find out how drastic the changes really were over the next few years.
Now with that consolidation of conferences too, the SEC is one step harder for us. The 9 game schedule will make it even worse.
And that’s the damnable misery of this whole thing. After all this time, we had finally figured out how to compete in college athletics even with our limited budget. In general, the system had never truly changed. Now these dipshlts go and change the whole system.
So the point of this is, you can’t use the previous era’s wins as a predictor of anything to come. Other than the fact that maybe you built some tradition or something.