Last year's "terrible" SEC bowl record was 7-5

I mean, 7-5 is not great by any means, but it's more mediocre than it is terrible. It's a winning record and that's more than most conferences manage most years. You have to figure on average, all things being equal, a conference should go roughly .500 in bowl games (the bowls are hypothetically supposed to be mostly evenly matched teams).

The reason it was viewed as so "terrible" was two fold

1. The SEC is held to a much higher standard than other conferences at this point.

2. The three highest profile games were losses (including two big blowouts)

But at the end of the day, last year's bowl season was not quite as terrible as people made out, just not up to the SEC's normal.