SEC at Playoff disadvantage because of tough games from months earlier, says Auburn coach

The SEC’s spent part of its week telling the Big 12 it should add a championship game, because everyone has sports opinions!

Missouri’s Gary Pinkel took that to its logical extent by declaring Notre Dame should be ineligible for the Playoff. When the ACC’s Jimbo Fisher tried this stuff, he got clapped back at by Art Briles, but some just live without any proper fear of a Texas tongue-lashin’.

The latest:

So the perception advantage (deserved and/or otherwise) that means higher rankings and higher Playoff likelihood for SEC teams comes at the cost of actually having to play good teams.

Maybe the champion of a tough conference suffers a few extra injuries, due to being unable to rest players. However, that champion has also been able to recruit better than teams from other conferences, thanks again to those perceptions. So it should have the superior depth to counter those injuries.

Also, the College Football Playoff starts on New Year’s, almost a month after the SEC Championship. The National Championship is well into the next calendar year. You’d think teams from different conferences would be just about equally fresh at that point, tough schedule or not.

The big thing here is that people are up to their eyeballs in SEC schedule braggery (and in what sounds like the SEC complaining about yet another thing), which is quite understandable, given facts like this: