CBS: End of an era ....

quote:

---

Excerpted:

Urban Meyer started it. Did Urban Meyer also finish it?

"It" being the SEC's reign of national championship dominance, of course, which began on Meyer's watch in 2006. His Florida Gators upset undefeated Ohio State in legendairly emphatic fashion, the first of seven consecutive SEC BCS titles that -- this much, at least, is not debatable -- changed the face of college football.

That streak ended with Auburn's loss to Florida State in the 2014 BCS championship, but at the time, it could be written off as a one-season fluke. The Seminoles were by far the strongest opponent the SEC had faced in a BCS title game, an undefeated juggernaut with a Heisman quarterback, NFL talents at nearly every position, and a season-long scoring margin comparable to the '95 Nebraska Cornhuskers; Auburn, meanwhile, had been 3-9 the season before and advanced to the national title game on the back of a series of narrow escapes and near-miraculous victories. Loss or not, that the SEC's weakest on-paper champion in years came within seconds of upsetting the best team the entire rest of college football had produced since Vince Young's Longhorns may actually have been a point in the SEC's favor.

There's no such comfort for SEC partisans in the wake of Alabama's semifinal loss to Ohio State and -- ah, the irony -- Urban Meyer. While Auburn was an 8.5-point underdog to the 'Noles, the Tide went off as 7.5-point favorites over the Buckeyes, and not without reason; not only was third-string quarterback Cardale Jones making his second career start, but this was the same Ohio State team that even with J.T. Barrett had lost by double-digits to Virginia Tech and struggled with the likes of Penn State, Minnesota and Indiana.

No matter -- the Buckeyes rolled up 537 yards on Nick Saban's defense, hounded Blake Sims into his worst performance of the season, and arguably should have beaten the SEC's top-ranked champion by more than the 42-35 final score. The Big Ten team that lost to the Hokies and lost its top two quarterbacks was still flat better than the best the SEC had to offer.

It wasn't just a shocking result -- it was the first such shocking result for the SEC in nearly 20 years, going back even further than the seven-season title streak or the entire BCS era. Remember that until Auburn's loss to Florida State, the SEC had never lost a BCS championship game to an opponent outside the league, going 8-0 in its first eight tries. The last time the SEC lost a postseason game with a national title on the line as something other than an 8.5-point underdog? You have to go back 19 seasons to 1996, when those '95 Huskers we mentioned obliterated Steve Spurrier's Gators in the Fiesta Bowl. That's how long it's been since the SEC suffered a bowl loss as damaging as the one it endured in the SuperDome Thursday night.

As any fan of any team outside the league would be quick to tell you, of course, Alabama's faceplant was far from the only embarrassment for the SEC this bowl season, with all three of its top 10 teams and five of its top-25 teams going down. Of those five losses, four came with the SEC team as the favorite, and the fifth was narrow underdog Ole Miss losing 42-3 to TCU.

Thanks to the surprisingly undefeated SEC East -- 4-0 after Tennessee's win over Iowa -- the conference's overall record of 6-5 isn't so bad. But that doesn't mean the following numbers aren't ugly:

Continued ....

---