Joel Klatt breaks down how the Big Ten surpassed SEC in college football

Last week, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey closed out the conference’s annual spring meetings by distributing a packet with favorable analytics that made the case the SEC is unlike “any other,” according to Yahoo! Sports’ Ross Dellenger. The point was clear: the SEC “stands alone” when compared to other conferences and deserves special consideration from the College Football Playoff selection committee.

Of course, there are others around college football that see Sankey’s effort as posturing from a once-powerful conference that hasn’t won a national championship in two seasons and is desperate to retain its hold atop the sport. One that some believe is fading rapidly.

Count FOX Sports analyst Joel Klatt among the SEC doubters. During a recent appearance on The Herd with Colin Cowherd, Klatt attributed the Big Ten’s run of back-to-back national championships for Michigan and Ohio State — after a decade of dominance from the SEC — by addressing how NIL and the transfer portal helped the Big Ten overtake the SEC as college football’s top conference.

“You start looking at this narrative the SEC has built up over the last few years, and late last year it started to crumble,” Klatt said after rattling off select SEC losses to both the Big Ten and Notre Dame in last year’s postseason. That included the Fighting Irish’s 2024 Playoff win over Georgia, the Buckeyes’ first-round rout of Tennessee and back-to-back bowl wins over Alabama for the Wolverines.

FOX Sports’ Joel Klatt calls out crumbling SEC ‘narrative’

Of course, Klatt couldn’t do that without first feeding into the unsubstantiated rumors the SEC was “paying players” before it was legal.

“The SEC and in particular the best programs within the SEC can no longer just stockpile talent and keep them as backups and even third-stringers all the time,” Klatt told Cowherd. “But now, rather than sitting as a backup at Alabama, you can go and be a starter at some other program and make six figures. And so the talent is not sitting there. … The depth of talent is now dispersing across the country.

“And what you see is when that happens it rewards teams that can play quality football at the line of scrimmage and retain talent and get veterans within their organization,” Klatt continued. “That’s what Michigan did, and that’s what Ohio State did. In part, it’s just kind of the overarching shift of where college football has gone, which has allowed the talent to not get really bogged down in one region. Now all those players are going all over for more opportunities, more starting spots.”

Whether or not the Big Ten has actually overtaken the SEC as college football’s top conference remains up for debate, especially given the elite-level of talent that still litters SEC rosters. But it’s clear the Big Ten also isn’t going anywhere, creating a compelling two-league race for dominance for years to come.