Kirby Smart admits the SEC has fallen behind the Big Ten in college football

Kirby Smart played a significant part in putting and keeping the SEC at the top of the college football pecking order.

Between his time at Alabama and Georgia, Smart was part of six national championship teams from 2009 through 2022. The last two came as the Bulldogs’ head coach.

Yet Smart is well aware the Big Ten has won the past three national championships, with Michigan, Ohio State and Indiana all taking home the prize. Add in that the Big Ten just had more first-round NFL draft picks than the SEC — by a 10-7 margin — and even a staunch SEC supporter like Smart sees the Big Ten is on top at the moment.

“I don’t know that, right now, you’ve got a lot of merit to stand on when it comes to the championships they’ve been able to win,” Smart said when asked on the “The Paul Finebaum Show” if the SEC is the best conference in college football. “Kudos to those three teams. Those are three really good teams, really good quarterbacks.”

The SEC did top the Big Ten in total draft picks, 87-68. But Ohio State’s 11 picks led all schools for the second straight year.

Indiana and Penn State each finished with eight draft selections, the same as Georgia.

Although it was a down year for Georgia in terms of both draft picks and first-round selections, Smart sees the talent spreading out across college football. His Georgia program is not immune to that.

“I think it’s the body of work of the draft,” Smart said. “You look at it and say, OK, our conference still puts out more National Football League prospects, maybe not at the top of the draft this year, but there’s been an evening out of things. I think that’s obvious, and I think it’s good for college football. I think it’s good when you have others.”

As for why the Big Ten has surpassed the SEC, Smart doesn’t dabble in the same theories some of his fellow SEC coaches do.

In his mind, the teams that play the best at the end of the season usually go on to win the national championship. With how Ohio State and Indiana have looked in the two versions of a 12-team College Football Playoff, it’s hard to argue with that.

Georgia has won the SEC in back-to-back seasons but has yet to find that same level of success in the College Football Playoff. That’s something he knows is no longer good enough to ensure a happy fan base.

“Apparently all we can do is win the SEC championship right now, so that’s not good enough, but you know those are good teams,” Smart said. “We got beat by the team that we beat (Ole Miss). It’s hard to beat a good team twice. They beat us, and Notre Dame was a really good team. I got a lot of respect for them, so we did not play well, and that falls on me.”