A sentence in an article on CBSsports made me think to do this:
The SEC has 5 of the top 11 teams. They don't all play each other, but still, that's a tough road to hoe. So imagine a conference of similarly-ranked teams (using ESPN's FPI, because it ranks all the teams):
Ohio State, Clemson, Oklahoma, Oregon, Wisconsin, Washington, Texas, Oklahoma State, Kansas State, Indiana, SMU, UCLA, Temple, Ohio U
Would there be major complaints if 2 teams from the conference listed above got 2 teams in the playoff? Maybe without the SEC names, it's not as damning?
As we've discussed before, at least some of the complaints about the SEC have to do with SEC teams playing only 8 conference games and for most of them, at most one P5 OOC game. Also a factor is that SEC teams play creampuff OOC games late in the season, like the week before conference rivalry games. They pick and choose which team plays in which bowl to the conference's best advantage. And they play those bowl games almost entirely within the conference footprint.
So here's Alabama this year, in order: Duke, NM State, USC-E, USM, Ole Miss, Open Date, A&M, Tennessee, Arkansas, Open Date, LSU, Mississippi State, Western Carolina, Auburn. That's not bad, but it's not Murderer's Row either. The schedule can be reduced to LSU and Auburn.
And I'm not bagging on Bama in particular. If I'm bagging on anyone, it's the whole conference.
Over the past 15-20 years, the SEC has usually--but not always--been the strongest conference. But IMO it hasn't been quite as strong as it appears to be because of the factors I listed above. Factors that do not apply to this degree to any other conference. And because the SEC is a bit overrated, it often gets breaks at the margin from human voters. Breaks like having teams that not only aren't conference champions, they aren't even division champions, get selected for the highest level of post-season play. The only non-SEC team I can remember doing that is Nebraska in 2001. But we've had an all-SEC rematch in the BCSCG in 2011 and a CFP rematch in 2017. In both cases, Bama got in and won the Natty without winning its division. And it seems like every year we have to listen to all the scenarios in which a 1-loss SEC non-champion would still "deserve" to go to the CFP.
With only four slots in the CFP (which I agree with, BTW), the fans of teams in the other conferences have to gnash their teeth as by early October the mediots are babbling about their dream scenarios in which two of those slots are filled by SEC teams. And the gnashing increases when those fans think about how the SEC's scheduling practices lead to the SEC teams having a bit of an additional edge in the selection process.