Anyone miss the good ole days of the SEC

[aubrandon 5]

I don't know about you guys but I miss when the SEC, as a whole, was hands down the best conference in America. Now the ACC rivals the SEC in who has the best conference. Times have changed but Miss ST was a very solid team. Ole Miss was one of those teams you could only beat by 7-10 points. They would always win a game that they were not supposed to win. Arkansas was going to give you thier best shot. They were always very good one year and rebuilding the next. Vandy would win five games as normal but would always beat one SEC school they were not supposed to. Kentucky was a 7-5 team. Yeah, that's correct Kentucky used to win seven games.

Auburn, LSU, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, and Georgia, I know has always and will always be strong. Excluding South Carolina, who is on the way up, the fall of the lower five teams is just embarrasing.

I would like to get your thoughts.

[Rocket City Tiger 4]

I know what you mean, it seems that the separation from the top echelon to the lower teams has gotten wider. Since is in the top, I don't mind. If you think about it, on the national scene, the top conferences are on top because of how good the top echelon is, not how bad the bad teams are.

But I am with you, I'd like to see the , , , and handily beat OOC opponents and not struggle or (gulp) get beat by the Maine's of the world.

[SLAG-91 1,483]

I thought this would be about the pre-expansion days of the SEC, back when AU played Tennessee, Florida, Georgia and Alabama every year...and Georgia Tech was included in that mix until '87.

Times change, though. We had very little history with LSU before expansion (to wit, AU only played them twice from 1982-1991), same with Florida and Tennessee matching up against each other.

I would submit that MSU, Vanderbilt and UK haven't really fallen from anywhere because they've never consistently been any good.

Mississippi State was mainly crap for about a decade until Jackie Sherrill took over, and even he had only middling success, all things considered...but middling success was a step up for MSU. Their bad years have outnumbered their good ones historically and they've since returned to craptacularness.

Kentucky has won as many as 7 games in a year exactly three times in the last quarter-century...1984, 1998, 2002. If anything, they were the perennial 6-5/5-6/4-7 kind of team that you use to describe Vanderbilt.

Vanderbilt...one bowl game in the last quarter-century and as many as 5 wins in only 7 of those 25 years.

South Carolina, Ole Miss and Arkansas are the teams in the middle that will give the SEC its quality depth...Ole Miss plays Missouri this weekend and that's a relatively even matchup of mid-tier BCS schools and a game that Ole Miss needs to win.

[RadioWryn 0]

I see two clear groups of teams in the SEC - the upper-tier and the lower-tier:

Upper-tier:

Alabama - 21 Outright SEC Titles (Last title in 1999)

Auburn - 6 SEC Titles (2004)

Florida - 6 (2000)

Georgia - 12 (2005)

LSU - 9 (2003)

Tennessee - 13 (1998)

Lower-tier:

Arkansas - 0

Kentucky - 2 (1976)

Mississippi State - 1 (1941)

Ole Miss - 6 (1963)

South Carolina - 0

Vanderbilt - 0 (1923 they did win the Southern Conference, but no SEC)

[quietfan 233]

I think the SEC still is hands down the best conference. 30% of the AP Top-10 are from the SEC. Any other conference have that much Top-10 representation? The Big Six of the SEC-- --are usually ranked in the Top 25 most years. Does any other conference automatically expect half its members to be in the Top 25 as a normal state of affairs? 3-4 of those top six are usually discussed as MNC contenders or dark horses every year. Does any other conference offer 3-4 MNC possibles as a regular state of affairs? The top one or two schools in other conferences might be as good as or better than the SEC's top 1-2 in a given year, but no other conference goes six deep in top ranked teams and no other conference has six teams that can make MNC rumblings on a regular basis.

I have to say, as far as MSU once being "a solid team": IMO, the only time MSU was consistently close to solid was under Jackie Sherrill's heyday..and Sherrill's methods were nothing to aspire to. Prior to that, MSU was back at their normal place in the universe, the bottom of the SEC. Admittedly, Ole Miss used to be consistently more dangerous. Heck, if you want to play Bama and look at ancient history, Ole Miss was a national powerhouse under John Vaught (spelling?), almost rivalling Bear Bryant's dynasty in Tuscaloosa.