Don’t worry about the SEC

The Sports Economist has some interesting nits to pick with the Wall Street Journal over the Journal’s recent article on college football in the South.

First, SE takes exception to the WSJ’s use of the term “Southern football” to mean merely football played in the Southeastern Conference, arguing instead that “Southern football extends outside the SEC and successful programs on the national stage, other than Alabama, also extend back in time.” He goes on to list some of those other successful programs:

“…outside the SEC, Clemson was pretty good, both North and South Carolina (when it was in the ACC and after moving to the SEC) have had success, and Miami and Florida State have pretty rich traditions of success on the national stage. And, as commentators on the WSJ website note, Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma are traditionally considered southern schools and they also have traditions of success dating back decades. SMU also was quite a powerhouse until it got the death penalty….”

Actually, I feel that the WSJ was entirely correct in confining its discussion to the SEC. First, folks in the Deep South would not consider the old Southwest Conference as “Southern,” no more so than Texans would ever claim to be “Southern.” Texas is its own place with its own peculiar economic and historical narrative.

Next, I’ll let slide the ridiculous inclusion of South Carolina as a “successful program on the national stage.” USC is one of the few major-college football programs to enter 2008 with a losing record all-time (521-523-44). In nearly 120 years of intercollegiate football, USC has one championship…ever – and that was when a 7-4 team won the ACC in 1969.

Aside from that, there seems to be an entire historical perspective missing in the SE piece. If you’re going to take a look at major college football as an economist would, taking in decades upon decades of data and history, the WSJ’s decision to concentrate on the SEC makes perfect sense. It has had a fairly stable membership since the early 1930s and its best programs have always been associated with the elite of the sport, “successful programs on the national stage,” as The Sports Economist has it.

By contrast, the ACC has had a tough task in breaking through to the elite level since its founding in 1953, when it was carved out of the old Southern Conference. Until the arrival of Florida State University in the 1990s, the ACC had only briefly fielded football teams considered truly elite – Maryland in the 1950s under Jim Tatum (but is Maryland “southern”?) and Clemson in the 1980s under Danny Ford. There were some programs that would bubble up occasionally and put together highly-regarded seasons (like North Carolina), but not the type of sustained success associated with Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, LSU, and Tennessee. This, I think, is demonstrated when you look at UNC’s historical performance against those programs in the 20th century, which was a woeful 16-43-2.

A pretty good analogy in understanding the historical relationship between the SEC and the ACC can be found in today’s Mountain West Conference. For instance, no one would deny that, historically speaking, the Mountain West (or the Western Athletic Conference, from which most MWC teams come) is an inferior football league to the Pac 10, despite the Pac 10’s lousy 1-6 record this year against MWC teams. The Mountain West is not a BCS conference, and its teams traditionally occupy a kind of second-class status within major college football. For much of its existence, the ACC has been viewed in the same manner across the Deep South…and for good reason. When you look at the historical head-to-head records, the SEC owns a huge advantage, particularly in the middle part of the last century, when major college football emerged as a hot media property.

This is the implicit historical state of affairs, the backdrop, as it were, that informs the WSJ article. I’m not saying this to take a swipe at the ACC – in fact, I don’t think the ACC receives enough credit for transitioning to the big time from its fairly humble origins. But, again, from an historical perspective, there really is no comparison between the SEC and ACC in terms of college football.

The Sports Economist’s second nit with the WSJ concerns the future of SEC football, claiming:

“If the article is correct, the changes that have wrought the SEC dominance are the seeds of SEC decline. More population and greater wealth will foster the development of more schools with aspirations to be “big time”. As that happens, it will be more difficult for the schools to get the best recruits and they will no longer have overwhelming superiority in talent. Indeed, I have already heard discussions linking the decline of Miami and Florida State to the competition for recruits from two newly successful programs, at USF and UCF.”

Again, this strikes me as wishful thinking. In business terms, the success of the SEC owes less to Sun Belt economics and more to the creation of strong brand identities. After all, SEC football programs were extremely successful long before demographic change recast the Old South into a tiger economy. Indeed, these demographic changes, relatively speaking, may have helped the ACC more than the SEC, allowing the ACC access to the resources to compete in what is a capital intensive business (though I’m using “compete” here in a most watered-down sense), so if the WSJ article can be faulted, it might be on this score. Still, as far as brand strength and brand awareness are concerned, the SEC today has never been stronger, and now that it has a captive broadcasting company of its very own (CBS), it will not likely see its status diminish anytime soon, demography notwithstanding.

The only real threat to the SEC at the moment is corruption. As the WSJ reported, every school in the league with the exception of Vanderbilt has been under NCAA investigation and/or sanctions over the course of the last quarter-century, and that alone points to very real concerns over cheating.

I am particularly sensitive to this issue because, in my lifetime, I have seen how corruption can take down once-mighty college athletic leagues, with the old Southwest Conference being Exhibit A. The SWC, which disbanded after the 1995 season, was once, arguably, the strongest football conference in the country, but its member schools were rocked, one after another, by a succession of scandals that, cut by cut, destroyed the competitiveness of the league by limiting its access to money and talent. Some observers felt that the league’s failure stemmed from its geographical isolation – after Arkansas bolted to the SEC, every team in the league was from Texas. But no one suggested that geography mattered much when the SWC ruled the roost. The truth of the matter is less complex – unchecked corruption, pure and simple, led to disaster.

Over the past decade, the SEC has cleaned up its act a great deal, almost out of necessity, as things were getting out of hand. Today, the SEC is cleaner and more penalty-free than it has been in some time, but given the competitive nature of the programs in the league, corruption is something that must be the subject of constant vigilance.

So, no, I completely disagree that the SEC is in imminent danger from the demographic changes remaking the modern South, mostly because its success wasn’t really predicated on such change in the first place. The region’s unique culture, which has led to its football programs’ incredibly strong brands and strong finances, and its ability to transmit that culture both intergenerationally and to transplants from other regions are far more the source of the SEC’s success. That doesn’t mean that SEC programs will not experience crests and troughs on the football field – the period 1999-2002 was one such trough – but overall, the league is positioned for success far into the future.