One way to evaluate popular perception of the SEC is to look at Vegas point spreads prior to kickoff. Since point spreads are designed to be as close to what the public perceives as even odds, they serve as a decent heuristic for what the public thinks are fair predictions for the games. Then we compare the results to the spread and see how well the SEC fared.

I'm not sure how accurate this site's odds are, so if you find they're off please feel free to correct me. But according to this...

The spreads:
Kentucky +13.5 at Louisville
South Carolina +4.5 at Clemson
Georgia -10.5 vs Georgia Tech
Florida +7 at Florida State

(Note: I rewrote the Georgia Tech one for consistency's sake.)

The results:
Kentucky 40, Louisville 44 (Kentucky +4)
South Carolina 17, Clemson 35 (South Carolina +18)
Georgia Tech 30, Georgia 24 (Georgia +6)
Florida 19, Florida State 24 (Florida +5)

We can subtract the actual spread from the expected spread to see how well the SEC teams did compared to expectations.

Kentucky: +13.5 - +4 = +9.5 relative to expectations
South Carolina: +4.5 - +18 = -13.5 relative to expectations
Georgia: -10.5 - +6 = -16.5 relative to expectations
Florida: +7 - +5 = +2 relative to expectations

So we can see Kentucky clearly outperformed expectations, Florida slightly outperformed expectations, and Georgia and South Carolina shite the bed.

If we want to get an overall measure, we could sum the performances relative to expectations. We'd get -18.5. So yeah, I'd say the SEC underperformed expectations and we can expect its street cred to take a slight dive.

Honestly, it probably already should have, but if it hasn't yet this doesn't help.