MIAMI — In the college football-crazed Deep South, David Cutcliffe is a recognizable face, perhaps even a regional celebrity.
After all, he attended the University of Alabama, spent nearly three decades as an assistant with the Tennessee Volunteers and was head coach of Ole Miss and Duke for a combined 20 years. In fact, he’s currently working at the Birmingham-based SEC headquarters as a special assistant to commissioner Greg Sankey.
So, naturally, as he shuffles through a central Alabama grocery store, he’s often interrupted by football fans of the SEC. Lately, the interruptions have grown more intense.
“I can’t go to the grocery store without getting a, ‘Hey! What’s wrong with us!?’” Cutcliffe said.
In the region of the country deemed as “the Deep South,” folks these days are feeling some type of way. For the second consecutive season, after nearly two decades of dominance, a college team from this rather small region of the country — six states in all and the heart of the Southeastern Conference — will not win the national championship.
Gasp!
The news has sent into a spiral those from either camp, Southerners and Southern haters, each publicly spewing defenses or attacks over the South’s struggles. Few arguments stoke the human soul more than a spirited debate over geographical and cultural differences between two regions of the country that, most will remember, fought a war against one another some 160 years ago.
There’s nothin‘ like a good deal made outta … where a person is from, what they believe, how they speak and where they eat.
Y’all vs. you guys.
Red vs. Blue.
Steak and potatoes vs. jambalaya and barbecue.
What’s better?
Who’s worse?
For years, on the college football field, the answer was quite clear: The South held a stranglehold on the sport like no other region of the country in its history.
From 2006 through 2022, a team from the Deep South won 16 of 17 national championships. Eight different schools claimed the crown over that stretch, all but one of them from that six-state footprint that incorporates Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina and Florida. Ohio State’s victory in 2014 is the outlier.
Alabama won six championships; LSU, Clemson, Georgia and Florida each won twice; and Auburn and Florida State have titles, too. What’s just as astonishing is that eight of those programs finished runner-up over that stretch — all eight of them losing to their own southern brethren.
But as the College Football Playoff semifinals arrive this week, the Deep South is nowhere to be found.
Ohio State clobbered Tennessee. Notre Dame beat SEC champion Georgia. And Texas, in its first year in the SEC, knocked off ACC champion Clemson.
The Deep South went 0-3. The SEC went 1-2. And the Big Ten, the SEC’s long-time rival and yet budding partner, is poised to have at least one and, perhaps, two teams in the national championship game.
In the Cotton Bowl semifinal, Ohio State is a 6.5-point favorite against Texas. In the Orange Bowl semifinal, the Penn State-Notre Dame matchup is a virtual pick’em.
“Imagine if it’s two Big Ten teams (in the national championship game) and the Big Ten is ruling the world,” said Paul Finebaum, a longtime television personality covering the SEC. “I’m not sure what we’re going to do down here in SEC country but hang our head.”
In fact, the South-versus-North discussion found its way into Orange Bowl media day Tuesday, when a question about the subject sparked a brief moment of pause for Penn State offensive coordinator Andy Kotelnicki, a Minnesota native who’s never coached in the South.
“I’m going have to be careful with what I say,” he said with a smile.
Others aren’t so careful.
“The question is, is the SEC’s dominance over? It is. It’s over,” said former Florida and Ohio State coach Urban Meyer on The Triple Option podcast last weekend. “Now, next year’s another year. But for (these) two years, it’s over.”
Done. Written off. Cast aside. Left for dead.
The SEC, and all those teams from the South, oughta just shut it down, huh? Shutter the windows. Slam the doors. The party’s over?
“I don’t see this as any reshuffling,” said James Carville, the political commentator and diehard LSU fan. “They’re not going to stop playing football down here. I’m not too worried about it. SEC football is going to be fine. I’d be surprised if they don’t win six of the next 10.”
But none of this explains why, for a second straight season, the Deep South is shut out not just of a national championship but of the championship game itself — the first instance since 2004-2005.
For many, the answer begins and ends with two transformations within the sport: the advent in 2021 of legal athlete compensation payments, and a less-restrictive transfer policy.
Stakeholders within the sport contend that the disbursement of talent is greater now than it’s ever been. Players, previously restricted to one school and penalized for transferring, are free to move at will. They are leaving schools as backups or role players for starting jobs and, in some cases, bigger paychecks, too.
SMU coach Rhett Lashlee claims that the blue bloods of college football — many of them in the South, as it turns out — can no longer “load up, create a monopoly and dominate over and over again,” he says. “Players are transferring so they can play and it spreads the talent out more.”
Andy Schwarz, an antitrust economist based in California who is integral to NCAA matters, views the two-year shift through a different prism. It is the result of a combination, he says, of both the expansion of the playoff from four to 12 teams and the introduction of compensation payments to athletes.
College athletics’ decades-long prohibition on athlete compensation and limited postseason opportunities resulted in a small group of big brands hoarding talent, he says — a reason that the sport, in a century of existence, has never shown signs of true parity.
“When you don’t pay the players and you have a restricted playoff system, it is designed to concentrate talent,” he said.
Well before the NIL era began in July 2021, Schwarz pushed back then against NCAA leaders who claimed that athlete compensation would lead to the rich schools getting richer in talent.
“The predictions were, ‘If you let Alabama pay, they’ll get all the best talent!’” he said. “The prediction I made a day before the NIL Era is we’ll see small improvements in competitive balance, not radical ones, because talent was already distributed the way the money flows, but we will see schools on the outside looking in that will have the ability to shake things up and change the pecking order because you can always just overpay somebody.”
The dissemination of talent is obvious, says Todd Blackledge, a television analyst who called SEC games for CBS and ESPN for two decades before joining NBC last year to strictly cover the Big Ten. Like many analysts in the sport, Blackledge often explained the SEC’s near 20-year dominant run through its defensive linemen. They were different in the SEC than anywhere else, he says: bigger, stronger, faster and with incredible depth and rotation.
“The majority of those top D-linemen, their high school footprint, was in that Southeastern footprint,” he said. “They set the SEC apart.”
And now? Like at many other positions, defensive linemen are more distributed across the country rather than consolidated among a small group of teams in their region. There’s only so many starting positions, after all.
The talent disbursement has left many blue-blood programs without much depth, a noticeable point this season, says Gary Danielson, who called SEC games for 18 years on CBS before the network moved to carrying the Big Ten.
“It’s harder to load up a team,” he said. “You could see it this year with Georgia when they got nicked. They didn’t have that immediate depth.”
“It’s different when you can’t say, ‘Next guy up!’ like you used to,” said former Ole Miss and Arkansas coach Houston Nutt.
Athlete compensation, the transfer portal, depth. Anything else?
How about the fact that the “Big Ten is back,” said former Wisconsin coach Barry Alvarez. “That’s what I see. It’s not just Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State. There are a lot of teams that are quality in the league.”
Some of them took down SEC programs in bowl games. A 7-5 Wolverines team stunned Alabama. USC stormed back against Texas A&M. And Illinois beat South Carolina.
There’s another explanation for the South’s woes: Saban is no longer in the conference.
Alabama won six of those 13 SEC national championships over that dominant span. There’s this too: A Saban-less Crimson Tide got raided for some of their best players last year, most notably by Big Ten power Ohio State.
Perhaps, though, there is a more simple explanation to all of this.
What if Georgia didn’t lose two fumbles against Notre Dame? What if Ole Miss didn’t cough up a lead at LSU or held serve at home against Kentucky?
Are we overthinking it?
“I think it’s a competition of the two conferences rather than a resurgence of one or the other,” said Gerry DiNardo, a Big Ten Network analyst who was head coach at Vanderbilt, LSU and Indiana. “I think they’re both very similar other than their culture differences because of where they are located. Can you say one conference is stronger than the other? I don’t think so.”
And DiNardo doesn’t want to hear your parity argument.
“We all have four blue bloods playing this week,” he said. “Tell me what’s changed? I see no shift. It’s a haves and have-nots business and it’s never going to change. You’re never supposed to say never but I’m saying it now.”
One thing that does appear to have changed, at least for now: The Deep South’s Reign of Terror is over. And, boy, they aren’t happy. Cutcliffe hears all about it.
“I just say to them, ‘Take it one day at a time!’”
