Auburn head basketball coach Bruce Pearl defended Georgia and its SEC schedule, and boosted the conference as a whole, in a passive aggressive snipe at recent CFP national champion Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, and the Big Ten as a whole.
“It does remind me a little bit of SEC football, in a sense that if you look at, just take Georgia and Ohio State, you know, Ohio State has a couple of big games in the Big Ten, you know, obviously, Michigan’s a big game, Penn State’s a big game, you know,” Pearl said to Coach K on Sirius XM . “But, you know, I don’t know the strength of the football conference. It’s not like the SEC and so every single Saturday, you got a chance to get physically whooped, mentally whooped.
“And if you look at the number of games that Georgia had to play, for example, you know, during the course of the regular season. Meanwhile, you know, some of the teams that were in it, like Ohio State, or even Notre Dame, man, they were excited in January about playing great teams because they only played one or two great teams during the course of the regular season.”
Pearl's takedown of the B1G is a common refrain from SEC fans. Any given season, though, what looked like a hard schedule in September could turn into an easy one. Michigan and Washington, the CFP finalists from the 2023/2024 season, turned into cupcakes by season's end.
Well, the Wolverines weren't a cupcake for the Buckeyes this past November. But the point stands.
If anything, the media is turning on this anti-B1G narrative in the NIL era. Kirk Herbstreit admitted to wanting Notre Dame, Ohio State, Penn State, Texas, and Michigan in the CFP instead of Alabama, Texas A&M, and Auburn.
Pearl is keeping up with a narrative that is going extinct the more teams like Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas lose to the preferred choices in playoff games.