What Everyone Is Missing In Their Attempts To Dunk On The SEC

The SEC has had a banner week.

The self-proclaimed "greatest football league of all-time" was attacked from pretty much all angles.

Ari Wasserman of On3 had some takes.

Reddit and X had some takes.

Hell, even some of my co-workers had some takes.

The counterpoints that were laid out ranged from "that's flawed but intriguing" to "do you even watch college football," but I noticed a lot of people making these arguments failed to address the elephant (or bulldog, or tiger, or… volunteer?) in the room.

One word: talent.

When arguing about the superiority (or lack thereof) of the SEC, I notice most of its detractors conveniently leave out one of the most important factors in determining wins and losses: the players.

It's hard to quantify talent and football isn't played "on paper," as some of you cheeky bastards love to remind me, but I will try and break down why the SEC, on the whole, has a talent advantage over the vast majority of the country, then use that fact to refute some of my "favorite" arguments.

Throw out all the analytics, the advanced metrics, the schedule-strength arguments, and anything else of the kind, and you will only need to remember one thing:

The SEC, by and large, has the best players in the country.

Let's start with recruiting.

If we take a look at the 247Sports composite rankings, the most balanced and comprehensive of the recruiting services that equally weighs rankings from every site, we will see that in the 2025 recruiting cycle (the most recent full cycle), the SEC signed 7 of the top 10 classes in the country, including the top 3. (Texas, Georgia, Bama).

If we zoom out even further, we get a better picture.

Not only is the SEC holding serve at the top, they are starting to stockpile more