Fear not, SEC: Someday, you’ll be back in the CFP title game

Dare to dream, Georgia.

Don’t abandon hope, Crimson Tide.

Keep wishing on a star, Greg Sankey.

Because one of these years, the SEC will once again have a team in the College Football Playoff championship game.

It may feel impossible, like trying to find an Ole Miss star Lane Kiffin hasn’t tried to poach.

But just keep showing up, and eventually one of your band of plucky underdogs will overcome the odds and actually beat teams from conferences you like to brag you’re better than.

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Don’t forget who you are, SEC. You dominated the BCS era and the CFP up until 2022, winning 13 of 17 national championships between 2006 and 2022. You had at least one team in all but one of them. Often, the games were soul-crushing runaways.

Never did the “SEC! SEC!” chant echo so sweetly.

You had all the advantages — the most talented players, the highest-paid coaches, the most passionate fan bases.

Actually, you still have all of those advantages.

But, somehow, the wins aren’t coming like they used to. In the past three seasons, you are 5-9 in the CFP.

Unfortunately, that’s actually better than your bowl record this year — 4-10, which is the sort of bungling that you used to make fun of the ACC for.

Whatever it means, it sure doesn’t mean more.

But take heart — the Big Ten can’t keep you down forever. Although with Indiana on the verge of making it three consecutive national championships for the Big Ten, with three different schools, maybe it will be a while.

Here’s a puzzler — SEC teams were 4-1 against the Big Ten in the CFP through the 2022 season but are 0-4 since.

Just spitballing, but it’s almost like NCAA rules that legalized athletes getting paid have somehow played a part in the SEC not getting as many elite players as before.

And, unfortunately, while you’re at it, maybe you actually do need to be a little worried about the ACC, too.

Miami knocked out Texas A&M and Ole Miss, and the Hurricanes didn’t even make their sparsely attended conference championship game, which was won by five-loss Duke.

You know what they say about the ACC, though — every week is a dogfight. There are no easy games. The fact that Miami lost two conference games just goes to show you how deep their league is, right?

You know how it is — you were 6-8 this year against that conglomeration of nerd factories.

But don’t worry. Someday you’ll rise up and exact your revenge on the conference whose TV contract was worth almost $100 million less than yours in 2023-24 and whose cute little stadiums squeeze out dimes and quarters compared with your 100,000-seat cash machines.

Just not this year.

There will come a day when your tens of millions in name, image and likeness deals that allow you to clean up in the transfer portal actually will produce a national championship, or at least a finalist.

Just not today.

Keep posturing and bellyaching that more of your teams should make the CFP field, because, frankly, it works. In this three-year drought of succumbing to schools and conferences you used to kick around like soccer balls, you’ve had more teams make the field than any other conference.

Just not enough.

Keep it up and, eventually, the CFP bracket will be so full of SEC teams, it’ll be all but impossible to not make the championship game.

Your teams won’t have to risk the embarrassment of losing at home as a 3½-point favorite to an ACC runner-up while not scoring a touchdown in a game in your home stadium for the first time in 15 years — the unjust condition forced upon Texas A&M.

Nor will they have to suffer the indignity of playing on the grandest stage in the game and suffering the worst bowl loss in their school’s proud tradition and getting called out by, of all people, Kirk Herbstreit — the cruel plank that Alabama was made to walk at the Rose Bowl when Indiana pummeled the Tide.

The next expansion of the CFP may be to 16 teams.

That would be perfect because the SEC has … 16 teams.

Might we propose a new CFP selection committee:

Chairman for life: Paul Finebaum.

Second in charge: Greg Sankey.

Secretary: Brad from Macon.

Fire up the confetti cannons.