The NFL Draft saw a record 15 SEC players taken in the first round, including a record six in the top 10. With the dominance on the field and in the draft, has the South taken over college football for good?
We’ve heard for years that football is just different in the South. Florida, Texas, and Georgia all help produce the majority of the talent that plays on Saturdays and Sundays in college and NFL football. The NFL Draft showed that once again.
It started with the Southeastern Conference, which set a record for the NFL Draft with six players taken in the first 10 picks, along with a record total of 15 SEC players taken in the first round. It was just a further display of the dominance of the conference.
In fact, in terms of the NFL Draft, if you count southern powerhouse Clemson, southern schools accounted for about 53 percent of first round picks of the draft in 2020.
In 2006, USC was regarded as the best college football team of all time, playing Vince Young and a powerhouse at Texas for a third straight championship. It was regarded as the greatest college football game of all time, and that game also featured three top 10 picks and two Heisman Trophy winners. It wasn’t crazy to say that the PAC 10 (before they changed to the PAC 12) and BIG 12 were the top of the college football world.
Then, Urban Meyer took over at Florida, and he led a powerhouse with the Gators. That was shortly followed by Nick Saban taking over at Alabama, the Cam Newton season at Auburn, Jameis Winston and Florida State, then the Dabo Swinney era at Clemson, which turned the Tigers into a true blue blood program.
Five of the last 10 Heisman Trophy winners have come from southern universities, and an absurd 13 of the last 14 National Champions have come from southern universities in the SEC, Clemson, and Florida State. It wasn’t long ago that powerhouses such as USC were competing for every postseason award and Oklahoma was playing in championship games, but they have since been frozen out by the best of the best in the South.
Before, there was parity in the college football landscape. Now, are the teams in the BIG 12, BIG 10, and PAC 12 being frozen out? Can they catch up to some of the football factories in the SEC and at Clemson? Oregon has consistently stayed competitive, and Ohio State did win a championship in 2013, but sometimes it feels like even these programs can’t handle the strength of southern football.
If you had to guess which one school outside the SEC would ever recover to reach the level of some of the powers in the SEC and ACC, you would guess Texas, which has an indispensable amount of resources and their own personal television network. But the inconsistency shown with the Longhorns leads me to believe that they are still a few years away from competing for National Championships and producing consistent world class talent.
Maybe more teams will grow and compete, but the proof is in the pudding, and the South continues to reign supreme.
Written by: Kyle Grondin
