Why don't people care about the SEC Championship Game

I really hate the 2014 playoff. I think it is going to kill what was the greatest regular season of all time. I think it already has started to. All the talking points that you've heard ad nauseum, like, I agree with them. And I'm not going to repeat them now because you've heard them and you probably agree with them. Nobody wants this thing. But what I find so fascinating is that so many of the people who claim to hate the 2014 playoff and the death of conference championship games that's coming with it, are so adamantly against their school potentially playing in a conference championship game. You can't claim that the SEC is at the forefront of college athletics, that it just means more, if you're also going to claim that the trophy given to the team who wins the conference doesn't matter, isn't something worth playing for. And I look right now and I see Georgia, one loss. You see all those fans, like, yeah, they've accepted. We want to go play in Atlanta. Georgia knows they have the inside track at it. They're all in. But I see Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and even Texas fans all, you know, four-way tie with two losses, all a little concerned about possibly playing in this game. All saying, well, we hope someone else in those plays because that would hurt our chances for the playoff. Texas, give it to them. They haven't been in the conference all that long. You're not a part of really the history there. Sure, you're telling me that Kentucky, with a history of mediocre football, wouldn't love? To get to say, yeah, we won the last ever SEC championship game. You're telling me that wouldn't mean something to them? You're telling me that this special Will Stein season, you know, a season that has been great, but it's probably not going to lead to a national championship. You're telling me that they wouldn't love to get to claim the SEC title? Say we won the last ever game? You're telling me Tennessee wouldn't love to do the same? Say, yeah, we beat Alabama this year, and then we beat Georgia in Atlanta? To claim the last ever SEC championship game win. You're telling me Alabama, who has won 11 SEC championship games since this thing first started in 1992, doesn't want to be able to say, hey, how else could it have ended? Alabama on top. Isn't that how it's supposed to be, right? And I'm speaking directly to the Alabama fan base here because I see a whole lot of them all scared off by what happened last year, all saying, oh, we don't want Alabama to play in the SEC championship game. We don't want to repeat a last year. That's ridiculous. That is ridiculous to me. If the game that decides the champion of the SEC doesn't matter, does the SEC matter? Like you want to bemoan all of the death of regional football and the nationalization of the sport. And then not care about the last ever game played to determine an SEC champion? Seriously? It just doesn't compute for me in my head. You could lose the SEC championship game and be in a worse position for the season, or for the postseason. I understand that. Happened in Alabama last year. Would Alabama have been better off if they had had an extra week off to heal? Yeah. You know, you weren't going to beat Indiana, but you probably weren't going to lose, you know, as awfully as you did. I understand that. I absolutely understand that, and I look at an Alabama team that's, you know, been a little banged up all year, and I understand that there's a big difference between, like, let's look at the options for Alabama. You could go 10-2, win your final three games. You're probably moved up to number four. You are probably getting a first round bye. You're probably not playing a football game for a month. Seriously, from Auburn until New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, you're not playing a football game. That's all the time in the world to heal up. I understand that. And I'm just saying the alternative, you go and you play an SEC championship game, right? And you lose. And now your players have played a football game. You may have suffered another injury there. And then you have to turn around and play a game in the neighborhood of, I think it's like December 19th, December 20th, somewhere in that range. That's a big difference. But at the end of the day, if you want this conference to matter, then the game that is a major part of the conference's history, a game that is the last chapter. Of, you know, the SEC championship game was revolutionary, right? It's historic. It was a key piece of the conference's development. So if the last one ever doesn't matter, does the conference even matter anymore? Or have we killed that off too? Food for thought as we enter the home stretch of the regular season.