By: Robert Craft

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

It’s been two beautiful seasons for SEC haters tired of the league’s dominance.

An SEC team hoisted the national title trophy in 13 of 17 seasons between 2006-2022.

Five different programs accounted for those titles, spreading the wealth around the conference: cementing its status as king of the sport.

Last season, the SEC was forced to endure the indignity of watching a Big Ten team (Michigan) beat a soon-to-be Big Ten team (Washington) for the national title. It was only the second time since Texas-USC in 2005 that the SEC sat on the sidelines during the national championship.

Now, as the College Football Playoff semifinals are set to begin, the SEC might find the same seat on the sidelines.

Notre Dame and Penn State faced off Thursday in Miami. A day later, Texas and a red-hot Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl.

The Longhorns, the first-year wearers of the SEC patch, the team who’s not part of the decades-long legacy, are the SEC’s last hope.

The South’s place in the sport may have slipped the past two seasons, but the league’s firm foundation is suited to handle the sport’s shifting sands better than any other conference. It will be back.

College football — especially roster construction and management — is changing. Stockpiling the quality of depth of talent that helped fuel Georgia’s back-to-back titles in 2021 and 2022 and Nick Saban’s decade of dominance at Alabama has never been harder to attain.

In the transfer portal era and with the advent of name, image and likeness (NIL), some argue building programs of that caliber is impossible.

Here’s the SEC’s cringeworthy slogan — “It just means more” — which works for most recruits because it’s true.

Michigan, Ohio State and Notre Dame have the three biggest fan bases in the sport, but none have access to highly talented high schools that SEC programs have in their backyards.

Talent wins out, especially in recruiting. The transfer portal equalizes the importance between acquiring talented athletes and keeping them at the program all four years.

Consider Michigan’s path to last season’s national title: It had just two five-star prospects on its roster. Michigan joined Auburn (2010) and Clemson  (2016 and 2018) as the fourth national champion that didn’t sign a top five recruiting class in the previous four years.

It had the nation’s 14th-most talented roster, according to 247Sports’ Talent Composite, which is weighted toward recruiting rankings.

What Michigan did have was NFL talent, proving that their ranking was far from gospel.

Michigan’s roster featured 13 picks in last year’s draft — nine of whom went in the first five rounds. The Wolverines have four more major contributors on last year’s team who are top 50 prospects in this year’s draft, according to draft experts.

Michigan’s title was a monument to Jim Harbaugh’s ability to scout and develop. He built a title-worthy roster in a manner seldom seen in modern college football.

Harbaugh was one of the best coaches in the sport, and this feat may never be duplicated. It’s certainly not a sustainable, long-term plan to churn out championships.

But consider this season’s Ohio State team, now the betting favorite to win the title in Atlanta later this month. The Buckeyes famously spent $20 million assembling this roster, and although acquisitions like running back Quinshon Judkins from Ole Miss and safety Caleb Downs from Alabama made the biggest offseason headlines, the bulk of that money went to making sure players such as WR Emeka Egbuka, DE Jack Sawyer, JT Tuimoloau, DT Tyleik Williams and running back TreVeyon Henderson came back to chase a title rather than beginning their NFL careers.

Now, these investments are well-positioned to pay off after an unthinkable loss to Michigan in the regular-season finale.

That $20 million is believed to be at or near the top of the market for a roster in the sport this season, and generally, the biggest spenders in the NIL era have been the teams that haven’t won big in recent years before money became the currency of roster building in college football.

Oregon, Tennessee, Texas A&M, Texas, Ole Miss and Florida State were among the most aggressive programs in the earliest days of NIL.

The sport is changing. The blueprint for building perennial championship contenders is evolving by the year, adapters will rise.

Georgia, Alabama, Florida, LSU, and others in the SEC are always going to be committed to doing whatever it takes to build a champion — at any cost.

In the interim, that almost certainly means they will funnel more money to collectives and NIL. This will go on top of the upcoming money for revenue sharing, schools will start paying players as a result of the House v. NCAA settlement.

As the sport has changed, programs such as Ohio State and Oregon have done the best job adjusting to those changes, while programs like Alabama and Georgia have tried to adapt their old model for success into the new world of college football.

The safe bet is it won’t stay that way for long. Talent wins out.