Pinned atop the SEC’s official YouTube page is the conference’s latest commercial.
The ad, which you may see on broadcasts each Saturday, is a continuation of the almost decade-long campaign that has turned the phrase, , into a combination of ethos, rallying cry and oft-used retort when trying to promote the superiority of the league.
Curiously, the 2025 edition opens with Arkansas defensive lineman Cameron Ball uttering the line, “There isn’t one thing that makes the SEC special.”
What follows is a five-second pause that allows the phrase to linger just a bit too long, heavily underscoring the point instead of connecting it to the subsequent note that there are, “a million different things,” which make the conference unique.
The initial line is true though. There is not one thing that makes the SEC special when it comes to this college football season—and that’s a problem when it comes to the lone measuring stick the conference has for itself in winning the national title.
It has been two long years of Big Ten dominance in the sport, which was previously the tightly held domain of those down south. There have been various attempts to explain this recent phenomenon: the transfer portal’s proliferation spreading out talent, the onset of liberalized NIL rules and even the hiring of much better coaches north of the Mason-Dixon line.
No matter the cause though, the SEC has to hope it will get its act together on the field over the course of the coming months. If it doesn’t, this slight swoon without a national title may turn into an actual prolonged slide for a league which had previously triumphed in the final game of the season for 13 of the previous 17 years and lorded over it even when they didn’t.
Much of this starts at the top. There is no elite team in the league anywhere close to the level that Kirby Smart had Georgia from 2021 to ’23 or the caliber of those Alabama teams under Nick Saban pretty much every time the sun rose in Tuscaloosa, Ala.
Those were all behemoths between the lines, the likes of which we probably won’t see anymore given the structural changes at work in the sport. Instead, there are more contenders in the conference capable of winning the College Football Playoff, but nearly all of them have more questions about their long-term viability than actual answers after Week 5.
The current highest-ranked SEC team in the AP Top 25 is No. 4 Ole Miss, which has been playing its backup quarterback and somehow generated buzzy headlines around its head coach’s daughter this weekend.
Fifth-ranked Oklahoma is without quarterback John Mateer for as much as a month while he recovers from hand surgery. No. 6 Texas A&M is eighth in the 16-team league in scoring offense and 13th in scoring defense, all while needing a botched extra point to escape at Notre Dame earlier this season.
No. 10 Alabama might have the clearest path to making it to Atlanta for the SEC title game, but that’s also the same team which was pushed around in the trenches in a loss to Florida State. The team it just beat, No. 12 Georgia, is closer to 2–2 than it is undefeated with Smart’s worst defense in recent memory. And let’s not forget the offensive issues which are still unresolved for preseason No. 1 Texas ahead of a critical few weeks for Steve Sarkisian and Arch Manning.
Heck, you can even make a decent case for 5–0 Vanderbilt or 5–0 Missouri to win the league right now, but that’s almost entirely based on their schedules and nothing to do with their overall talent level.
When it comes to having a fun and competitive conference race, the SEC is actually what we all thought the Big 12 was going to be in 2025. Everybody’s a contender in the league, but when it comes down to winning the CFP crown, there’s more skepticism now than actual belief.
What might really rankle the folks down in the conference offices in Birmingham though, is that this sure looks like a key window to wrestle control of that golden cylinder away from the Big Ten. If that doesn’t happen, the crisis of confidence may truly start to mean a little more as the Big Ten keeps racking up wins in December and January.
Reigning national champion Ohio State seems to have picked up where it left off during its CFP run last year. The Buckeyes still have superstar wideout Jeremiah Smith, versatile chess piece Caleb Downs and a defense in 2025 that is somehow even better than it was with all those NFL draft picks (is the only team to score more than once against them after four games). Coach Ryan Day feels far more relaxed in Columbus now that the monkey is off his back and this program is as close to recession proof as they come, a regular contender to win it all each and every season.
There’s also the matter of Oregon, which still hasn’t lost a regular-season game since joining the Big Ten and seems primed to be an elite team as long as Dan Lanning remains in Eugene, Ore. Quarterback Dante Moore is one of the Heisman Trophy favorites right now (and he still has plenty of eligibility left). The runway seems like a long one for this group with the likes of Dakorien Moore and Dierre Hill Jr. who have impressed as true freshmen. Uncle Phil (Knight) won’t let money be an issue for anything on or off the field either.
Meanwhile, Penn State may not be able to beat a top-10 team, but it sure has the resources to keep knocking at that door. The Nittany Lions were just a pass away in the semifinal last season. Michigan has a quarterback of the future to build around in the present, Nebraska is much better positioned under Matt Rhule and Indiana has shown no drop-off at all under Curt Cignetti as it contends for another CFP bid.
Even USC, which has been a non-factor since Lincoln Riley’s first season in Los Angeles, seems to be getting its act together and has the No. 1 recruiting class for 2026 ready to help vault the Trojans back into the national conversation.
Such teams seem far more capable of surging than regressing on the field, which isn’t quite the case for those in the SEC with South Carolina, LSU, Tennessee and Florida all taking a step back from 2024. Just five others cruise into Week 6 undefeated. That number is poised to shrink further not because of some brutal slates but more so from lack of separation between good and great.
That doesn’t mean commissioner Greg Sankey needs to start brainstorming new ideas to reassert the league’s dominance or fast track the pending hire for a new football czar in the league office just yet.
There’s still time for teams to grow and evolve. There’s still a decent enough chance that some SEC team gets hot, pulls together all that talent they have on hand and makes a run to South Florida with a decent shot to win it all.
At least that’s the hope.
Because without that, without another national title to parade around come next summer, there’s nothing special to separate the SEC from everybody else in college football.
