When you're beat, you're beat and a winning team's fans dismissing its vanquished opponent as time winds down is a time-honored tradition, e.g., "Hit the Road, Jack!"
There are many signature cheers and chants in college sports. Ohio State's stadium-circling "O-H-I-O!", FSU's tomahawk war chant and Tennessee's Rocky Top are a few that immediately came to my mind. The top spot on the obnoxious list, though, has to be "SEC! SEC! SEC!", an annoying chorus that's stalked and haunted fans of teams from the B1G and the other conferences for decades.
It's left us with nowhere to go, nothing that we can say back, our butts humbled on the field, our voices muzzled and muted in the stands.
But as I was reading through the comments on the thread I created yesterday about the B1G's expansion options by looking at various data points, particularly AAU membership as a traditional requirement for an invitation to join the B1G, it got me thinking about how the other P5 conferences and their members stack up against each other academically. I conducted a quick Google search, found a site that lists and ranks 2020's top 500 public and private schools based on their average SAT and ACT scores and created the chart below. I chose SAT and ACT as a universally accepted measure over GPA, which we all know is more subjective and can vary widely. And while there are many sites that list colleges' average test scores, I suspect that even if other data does not match what I found exactly, it's probably pretty consistent.
Topline: with the exception of the eight remaining members of the Big XII--which scores pitifully low for both tests--every other P5 conference significantly outscores and outranks the SEC in both the SAT and ACT.
That means that even in a loss, the losing team's fans' comeback to "SEC! SEC! SEC!" could very well be "SAT! SAT! SAT!" Translation: Your team may have beaten mine on the field but you'll be back to working for me tomorrow.
Here's the data--each conference's teams are ranked based on the best SAT score and rank to the worst:
