2. Coaches Poll 2021: SEC Expansion – It’s Scarier Than You Think
So the SEC is going to add Texas and Oklahoma to the mix at some point over the next few years – whatever.
As I’ve said from the start, all it means is that the SEC will make more money off the field, and on it, 15 teams won’t win the SEC Championship instead of 13. Big deal. So the league expands and gets more interesting and …
The 2021 Preseason Coaches Poll shows just how much this will matter to college football.
Ohio State and Wisconsin. Those are the two Big Ten teams ranked in the preseason top 15, and Indiana, Penn State and Iowa all made it into the top 20.
Alabama, Georgia and Texas A&M are in the top six. Throw in Oklahoma, and the SEC of the near-future will have four programs in that top six. In a powerhouses-go-powerhouses sort of way, Clemson and Ohio State are those other two.
Combine the Big Ten and the future SEC expanded look, and more than half of the top 25 is taken up by those two conferences.
Expand it out and the SEC has eight teams – Alabama, Oklahoma, Georgia, Texas A&M, Florida, LSU, Texas, Ole Miss – in the top 25 with Auburn, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas and Mississippi State all getting votes, too.
To take this to another level, let’s just say the preseason Coaches Poll ends up mirroring the final College Football Playoff rankings. The expanded College Football Playoff proposal – 12 teams, top six ranked conference champions – six wild-cards – would mean the SEC would get five teams into the playoff.
Technically, as it stands with this preseason poll, along with the SEC, only the ACC – Clemson and North Carolina – would get more than one team into the CFP.
That’s not a positive for college football.