Cleveland: A Look Back at SEC Media Days

So let me get this straight: At SEC Media Days last week, Alabama was picked to win the SEC West and Auburn was picked to win the overall SEC Championship.

Yet, Auburn can’t win the SEC Championship unless it first wins the SEC West. This seems a pretty ironclad Catch 22.

As a 30-something year veteran of SEC Media Days — dating all the way back to the SEC Skywriters Tour — I would love to tell you this surprises me.

It does not.

As prognosticators go, those who cover SEC football cannot pick their nose. I can say this with complete confidence. After all, I was once a picker. If you asked the SEC media to handicap the 2016 Presidential race, they’d pick Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic primary and Hillary Rodham Clinton to be the next president.

That’s why Mississippi State fans ought to be happy the Bulldogs, No. 1 in the nation for weeks last season, are picked seventh of seven teams in the SEC West this season.

The Dogs are picked seventh even though their quarterback, Dak Prescott, is picked as the All-League quarterback. You can count the number of times a last place team has had a first team quarterback on the fingers of one foot. This is to say, it has never happened. It probably never will happen. Don’t tell the SEC media that.

How you ask, can the the guys and gals who watch SEC football every Saturday be so bad at forecasting what’s going to happen? My take: You sit in an ice cold Birmingham hotel ballroom for the better part of a week listening to coaches reel off cliché after cliché and your brain kind of goes numb. You lose track of time. You overdose on the importance of senior leadership and how each team is playing the most difficult schedule in school history. You forget things. You forget things like that in order to win the SEC Championship you must first win your own division. It happens.

The ol’ ball coach, Steve Spurrier, knows this. Actually, he revels in it. He used to make fun of the media every July for their picks of the season before. He even said it once: “You guys can’t pick your nose.”

And he was right. “Eeny meeny miney mo” works better as a forecast than the SEC media.

And while I would love to really believe that a cold Birmingham ballroom and a million cliches is what causes such errant forecasting, I know better.

We were no better when we flew around from SEC campus to SEC campus in August heat on the SEC Skywriters Tour and the athletic departments wined us and dined us, each trying to outdo the other at each stop. Our brains turned 90 proof.

In fact, I believe that the old skywriters tour is why the SEC Media still can’t pick a champion from a has-been.

Back then, you would go to Tuscaloosa each year and hear Bear Bryant tell you how pitiful his Crimson Tide team was going to be. “We’re not very big, but we’re slow, too,” Bryant would say. If you listened to the Bear and really believed him, you would think Alabama was not going to win a single game.

But we veterans knew better. We knew that Bryant’s too little and too slow team was actually made up of fast, agile giants who were going to kick everybody’s rear end and wind up playing for the national championship in the Sugar Bowl.

He knew. We knew. Back then, you didn’t have to worry about divisions. You didn’t have to win your division in order to win the league. All you had to do was fill out the top line of your pre-season poll: A-L-A-B-A-M-A.

Four times out of five, you got it right. It got too easy. Then Bear retired, then he died. We have never recovered.

Rick Cleveland rcleveland@msfame.com is executive director of the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and Museum.