<p>It’s coming.</p><p>In fact, you are already in it.</p><p>The Summer of Unlove.</p><p>The college football nation is slowly breaking up with the SEC as if it found a prettier girl with less baggage. The haters have always been hating, but deep in their hearts they have known which conference is the best. Suddenly, they feel like they have ammunition for battle, like they are no longer taking a handful of uncooked pasta into a knife fight.</p><p>The unbiased media is looking for a new story, something other than SEC dominance. Even in the SEC Nation, there are some doubters.</p><p>There are arguments against the SEC, certainly. Those arguments get louder the closer we get to actually playing some real, live football games.</p><p>Speculation is a summer sport played around swimming pools, on golf courses and in pubs around the country. Get ready for it to get thicker until SEC Media Days in July when the conference sticks its chest out in Hoover, Ala.</p><p>And after the dust settles on the last ESPN car wash and the last Alabama fan disguised as a working journalist has asked some inane question about a player you’ve never heard of before it’s only going to crank up again throughout August.</p><p>Get ready for these talking points.</p><p>*The first is the most obvious. After seven straight national titles, the SEC has been shut out the last two years. OK, Auburn was a minute or so away from winning it all two years ago and Alabama was in the first College Football Playoff, but 0-for-2 is 0-for-2.</p><p>To hear some talk about it, the king is dead. Long live the king.</p><p>*The SEC had four 11-win teams for four straight years until last year when it only had two — Alabama and Missouri and Missouri lost to Indiana. That’s proof that the league has taken a step back.</p><p>Forget that the SEC went 56-12 in non-conference games and that no team has a worse non-conference record than 3-1 and that the league was so strong that teams beat each other up. Mere facts, my friends.</p><p>*Because everyone who wants to believe that the SEC isn’t what is used to be will point to the last regular-season Saturday last year when the ACC went 4-0 against the SEC. Proof, I tell you, proof.</p><p>Of course, all four losses were by SEC East teams who had a combined record at the end of the season of 29-21 and the four losses were to ACC teams that went 43-11.</p><p>*The SEC lost five bowl games. Five. If that doesn’t show the SEC was down last year, nothing does.</p><p>OK, so the league won seven bowl games, more than any other conference.</p><p>It lost five. End of story.</p><p>*The new king of college football — Urban Meyer’s Ohio State Buckeyes — has three quarterbacks better than any quarterback in the SEC.</p><p>That one’s difficult to argue. The SEC has a real issue at the quarterback position. …
Continue Reading: Summer chatter hating on SEC
