Indiana 38, Alabama 3. If the SEC needed a wake-up call, this was it. Alabama, once the gold standard for a league that was considered the gold standard of college football, totally embarrassed by an upstart Indiana team that has used NIL, revenue sharing and a total dismantling of the sport’s system of governance to rise to the top.
Alabama doesn’t lose like this. In fact for 17 years under Nick Saban, it barely lost at all. The last time an Alabama team was beaten this badly was in 1998, pre-Saban, when it was taken down by Arkansas, 42-6.
And during Saban’s 17-year run, outside of his first year when he was 7-6 in 2007 and when he lost three games in 2010, Saban’s teams never lost more than two games in a single season.
That laid the foundation for the SEC to become the best league in the country, with Alabama, Georgia and LSU generally leading the way. But it wasn’t only the big three.
Florida was a powerhouse. Auburn could beat anybody on a given Saturday. So could Tennessee. And, as the league continued to grow, adding teams like Missouri, Texas A&M, Oklahoma and Texas, you had to clear even more hurdles to stay of top. And that’s what made the SEC so good. It had depth.
Other conferences, particularly the Big Ten, could pretty much stand toe-to-toe with the SEC when it came to squaring off at the highest level, but the Big Ten had no answer for teams like Florida, Auburn, Tennessee and some others who could come out of the pack and hold their own against anybody.
Once Congress and the courts said anything goes, though, everything changed. There was no one in control anymore, not the NCAA, not the conferences, not anybody. Players could move freely from school to school. They could make money off NIL. And now, beginning in 2026, revenue-sharing, outright cash payments to players for their services, takes effect.
College football has become a mini-NFL and, as a general rule, the more money you spend the better your team will be. The best example of this is Texas Tech, which poured cash into the transfer portal to get the players it needed to win and made the playoffs this year.
These changes have hit the SEC hard. Good players who, in the Saban era, would have stayed on at SEC schools now started going to other places where they could play immediately and make more money, and the depth wasn’t there anymore.
That was apparent this year when the SEC posted a 4-10 record in postseason competition while the Big Ten went 9-4 and has Indiana playing in the CFP championship game Monday.
So the SEC has had to adjust, reorganize, re-think what it needed to do to win. A case in point is Florida, which has fallen into mediocrity the last few years and is far removed from the Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer eras.
Frustrated by the way the program has collapsed, Florida now seems to better understand what it needs to do to not only bring in championship talent, but keep it and build around it.
“We can only maximize our potential with your full support,” Florida’s new coach, John Sumrall, said at his opening press conference as reported on the Gators’ athletic website. Sumrall was referring to boosters and others necessary to making a college program successful in the new era.
“It takes all of us working together to win championships,” Sumrall continued. “The standard here is championships, and that’s why I came. Winners win. I’m a winner and we’re going to win,” he predicted.
In addition to Sumrall, Florida made a key administrative hire when it brought in Dave Caldwell, an experienced NFL exec, to be the program’s general manager.
“I believe retention of the base (keeping the players you bring in) is the most important thing to build on. We need those guys to stay,” Sumrall went on. This in contrast to schools like Ole Miss and Texas Tech which seem willing to turn over almost their entire roster every year.
“I believe the life blood of your program is recruiting good high school players and, at Florida, elite high school players, and keeping them,” Sumrall remarked.
That has proven difficult at most places, because players don’t want to sit and will leave for more money and a chance to play elsewhere. Defending national champion Ohio State, for example, has lost 30 players in the portal. Still, it has the resources necessary to replace them.
“I think with the model we’re in now, it’s not going to be a deal where Dave (Caldwell) goes out and gets players and hopes it works out,” Sumrall said. “I’m going to be very involved. We’re going to be in partnership and we’re going to be in lockstep on how we put together our roster.
“The head coach gets pulled in a lot of different directions now but my No. 1 job, and I have a sign in my office that says “Coach the team,” is to coach the team,” Sumrall emphasized.
Sumrall dismissed the notion that the Gators are in desperate shape. “I think there’s a lot right with this program,” he said. “I have to diagnose all of that and it will take some time. But we’re going to do everything we can to win fast and I also have a plan for how we can win long term.”
Sumrall seems to have his priorities right here, because as Indiana, Vanderbilt and a few others have shown, you can win fast. And if you don’t win fast, you’re not going to win long term because you won’t be around.
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