Tennessee gets sent to the Gator Bowl. With a record of 3-5 in conference and 6-6 overall, they are at best the 10th of 12 bowl-eligible teams. And yet, they’re off to the same bowl that snubbed Vanderbilt last year when they went 4-4 in conference and 8-4 overall. We sank to the bowl in Birmingham, which now winds up with a 6-5 Florida team that didn’t even reschedule a non-conference game washed out by weather.
Nothing in the SEC – not your performance on the field, not your performance in the classroom, not your ability to stay out of legal trouble, not the quality of your performance in any other sport – matters as much as how good you were at football in the 1970s. That’s how we can go 8-4 in back to back years and play one bowl four miles from home and another in Birmingham while that school to the East can go 6-6, get bowl eligible for the first time in four seasons, and vault to a bowl four spots above where its standings would suggest.
I don’t know where else we could go. I think the inherent nature of the playoff system and the burgeoning of 12 and 14-team conferences means that nowhere else can be that much better. I certainly don’t much care for the prospect of being the 14th team in the ACC or the B1G. Ideally, I’d love to see the world set back as it was in 1990 for college football purposes – no bullshit about conference title games (we’ve had a playoff since 1992, if we’re honest about it), no automatic tie-ins below conference winners, and nothing but a mythical national title at the end, rather than some half-assed combination of polls and computers and committees to do the same thing with a veneer of scientific respectability around it.
Fuck it. More than ever I’m thinking the Ivy League might have been the place for me: no postseason at all, no football scholarships, just ten games to line up and sic ’em and to hell with what anyone else wants to do. There’s the dream, and if it means an end to the SEC run for Vanderbilt, so be it. Georgia Tech certainly hasn’t suffered by departing.