SEC bias from ESPN is plaguing college football and Miami is one of the reasons it will stop

Laura Rutledge made the case this past week that SEC teams enter the College Football Playoff at a disadvantage because the conference's schedule is uniquely brutal, and that those nine games leave teams gassed by the time the postseason arrives.

While the SEC deserves respect, the argument falls flat when you dig a little deeper.

Why Laura Rutledge's "SEC teams are gassed" argument doesn't hold up.

The Big Ten has played a nine-game conference schedule since 2016, and the Big 12 has done the same for years. The SEC is only just catching up to a format two of the other three power conferences have already been running for the better part of a decade. The ACC is moving to nine games in 2026 too, the same year as the SEC. The catch is the ACC has an odd number of members, 17 teams, so this season works as a transition year. 12 of those 17 teams already play nine conference games, and Miami is one of them. Starting in 2027, 16 of the ACC's 17 teams will play nine games every season.

So by the time this season kicks off, every power conference is either already at nine games or actively moving there. The idea that nine SEC games represents some singular gauntlet nobody else deals with just isn't accurate anymore, if it ever fully was.

Also, if grinding through nine conference games wore teams down heading into the Playoff the way Rutledge suggests, the Big Ten should be exhibit A of that fatigue, given it's been playing that exact format the longest.

Instead, the Big Ten has shown the opposite of that. Indiana finished with a perfect season and won the national championship, and Ohio State won it the year before that. Neither program looked gassed in December and January. They looked like the two best teams in the country.

Miami is one of the teams that will break the SEC bias within the sport

Rutledge's comments came the same week that ESPN Analytics released a preseason strength of schedule ranking with every single SEC team inside the top 20 nationally. Many critics immediately panned it, calling the rankings circular.

SEC teams get labeled as tough opponents because they play other SEC teams, and SEC schedules get labeled as difficult because they're full of those same tough opponents. Ole Miss landed a top-10 schedule ranking in that release despite a non-conference slate that includes Wofford and Charlotte.

It's things like that which fuel the argument that ESPN, as the SEC Network's owner and the conference's primary broadcast partner, has a financial incentive to keep the conference positioned at the center of the sport.

Miami is one of the best counterweights against that outside of the Big Ten. Miami played for the national championship last season, and it did so by beating an SEC team, Texas A&M, in the first round of the Playoff and another SEC team, Ole Miss, in the semifinal.

A results-based sport doesn't have much room left to argue Miami doesn't belong in the sport's biggest conversations, and that's before accounting for the three straight national titles the Big Ten has actually won during this stretch of SEC-favored coverage. The more Miami keeps winning games that matter, the harder it becomes for any network, ESPN included, to keep framing the SEC as the default center of the sport rather than one of several conferences actually producing champions.

If the ACC can crown a champion before the SEC returns to the top, then ESPN may finally have some of the uncomfortable conversations that are long overdue.

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