MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — A three-year championship drought is not stopping the SEC from asserting its power and position as still the top conference in college football.“If you look at the entirety of our league, we are by far the most competitive, the strongest football league by far,” commissioner Greg Sankey said Wednesday, addressing reporters after Day 2 of the SEC’s spring meetings.The SEC won 13 national titles from 2006-22, never going more than two years without one, and only once (2014) not sending a team to the championship game.Since then, the Big Ten has won three straight national titles (Michigan, Ohio State, Indiana), and the SEC has not had a team play in any of the last three championship games. The Big Ten is 4-0 against the SEC in head-to-head College Football Playoff matchups during that time.Sankey pushed back on the notion — based on that four-game sample — that the SEC has fallen behind the Big Ten.“So that’s a pretty narrow band,” he said.Sankey cited a last-second missed field goal as the difference between Ohio State and Georgia in the 2022 CFP semifinal, which Georgia won before going on to claim the SEC’s last national title.The next year, Michigan beat Alabama 27-20 in overtime in the CFP semifinal and won the national title to start the Big Ten’s best run in decades.“The margins are so thin,” Sankey said.“You look at the Texas-Ohio State (2024 CFP semifinal), Texas scores, there’s a screen play (by Ohio State), breaks the game open,” Sankey said. “You go to possessions in the red zone, really close, and there’s a (Texas) turnover.”He also mentioned the narrow margin of the Ole Miss-Miami semifinal from last season’s Playoff. The Hurricanes from the ACC scored late to take a 31-27 lead and held on to advance to the championship game against Indiana.Ole Miss threw an incomplete pass into the end zone from Miami’s 35-yard line on the final play of the game. Contact by a Miami defender on the Ole Miss receiver had Rebels supporters calling for a pass interference that did not come.“The ball’s in the air. Ole Miss, Miami, I’m standing in the end zone, pretty good grab,” Sankey said. “That wasn’t a Hail Mary, that was an attempt to score a touchdown on the last play, and those are small margins between winning and losing. We prevailed on those small margins a number of times.”For the second consecutive year at SEC spring meetings, the league’s coaches have expressed dismay with the CFP selection process, saying the conference’s quality, depth and strength of schedules is not being properly respected by the committee.The SEC had only three teams selected to the first 12-team playoff in 2024, but led all conferences with five teams in the field last year. The SEC’s eight overall CFP selections over two years are the most of any conference. The Big Ten has had seven.“But in a competitive environment, the margins are going to be thin, and we’ve come up on the short end, and I can assure you that everyone in this league is trying to figure out how to come up on the top end of that in the future,” Sankey said. “But I think from a big picture, the breadth, the depth of this league. This league stands alone. In fact, we saw metrics out of the College Football Playoff presentation where there’s no doubt we’re the strongest league. Now, there’s some segments of other leagues that are towards where we are, but not nearly the entirety of a conference, like the Southeastern Conference. It’s a pretty special place.”May 28, 2026Connections: Sports EditionSpot the pattern. Connect the termsFind the hidden link between sports terms