Big Ten coach takes shot at SEC and College Football Playoff rankings

· Yahoo Sports

After his team’s 24-13 victory over Nebraska on Friday, Nov. 6, Illinois football coach Bret Bielema was feeling a little bit chesty.

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But it wasn’t his recently vanquished foe he directed that energy toward. It was another conference.

While praising his team for becoming bowl eligible for the third consecutive season – something the Fighting Illini hadn’t done since the early 1990s – he took a shot at the SEC three days after the conference’s teams played a controversially large role in the first College Football Playoff rankings of the 2026 season.

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“If we were in the SEC, we'd probably be a top-15 team,” Bielema said. “We've just got to continue to stay on track where we're at and do a really good job of holding the moment and putting ourselves in a position to be successful."

Of the top 14 teams in the first batch of rankings from the playoff selection committee, seven were from the SEC. The most dubious of those selections were a two-loss Alabama team at No. 5 and a two-loss Texas team at No. 7, putting both of them ahead of undefeated UCLA, which was No. 8. The Crimson Tide are No. 9 the Longhorns are No. 11 in the US LBM Coaches Poll.

Big Ten teams with two losses weren’t afforded nearly the same grace as their southern counterparts, with No. 12 Ohio State, No. 19 Iowa and No. 20 USC all outside the top 10.

Illinois, which was 5-3 at the time of the rankings’ release, wasn’t included in the top 25, nor did it receive votes in the latest Coaches Poll. No three-loss team in the playoff rankings was higher than No. 21 (South Carolina, also from the SEC).

Bielema became the latest Big Ten coach to express frustration with the SEC’s pronounced role in the committee’s rankings. Earlier this week, both Indiana’s Curt Cignetti and Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz indirectly or directly pointed out how the SEC and the reputation of its teams benefit from the league’s media-rights partnership with ESPN.

"SEC gets a lot of love from ESPN and all their writers that they don't technically pay but march to their drum," Cignetti said. "That's why you see all these SEC teams up there, and some good two-loss teams from the Big Ten not quite as high. But like I said, it's all going to be played out on the field."

As some SEC partisans argued, Bielema doesn’t necessarily have a leg to stand on in the argument.

The sixth-year Illini coach, who has gone 25-10 since the start of the 2024 season, went 29-34 in five seasons as the head coach at Arkansas, from 2013-17 — including an 11-29 mark in SEC play.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Big Ten coach takes shot at SEC and College Football Playoff rankings

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