4 Big Ten teams in the top 5?? Wild season so far. And the dropoff is not too far off for a little. But digging a little deeper, a lot of it is how many absolute dog shit teams there are in the B18 compared to the SEC. Pretty much 10 of the teams in the B18 can't even come close to competing with a top team, whereas only 4 SEC teams are at this level. So you end up with a lot of B18 teams with very good records, and a lot of SEC teams with 2-3 losses.

I've broken the Sagarin rankings by conference down into categories and counting teams at each level:
* Title Favorites (within 3 points of the top team)
- SEC: 4 (Alabama, Texas, Ole Miss, Georgia) 
- B18: 2 (Oregon, Ohio State)

* Title Contenders (3-7 points within top team)
- SEC: 2 (Tennessee, South Carolina) (yes, I know SC is not making the playoffs, but they are very capable of beating top teams)
- B18: 1 (PSU)

* Respectable Teams (7-10 points within the top team)
- SEC: 2 (Texas A&M, LSU)
- B18: 2 (Indiana, Iowa) (the model here thinks Indiana will be a significant underdog to top teams... which Vegas seems to agree on, Bucks are 10 point favorites over them)

* Middling Teams (10-14 points within the top team)
- SEC: 4 (Missouri, Oklahoma, Florida, Auburn)
- B18: 3 (USC, Michigan, Wisconsin)

* Below Average Teams (14-17 points within top team)
- SEC: 3 (Arkansas, Kentucky, Vanderbilt)
- B18: 4 (Minnesota, Nebraska, Washington, UCLA)

* Bottom Feeders (17-21)
- SEC: 0
- B1G: 3 (Illinois, Rutgers, Maryland)

* FCS Wannabes (21+ worse)
- SEC: 1 (MSU)
- B1G: 3 (Michigan State, Northwestern, Purdue)

Really shows a lot of the depth of the SEC - A 14 point underdog will win 15% of the time. That's not uncommon. You have zero weeks off other than your FCS games and MSU. Whereas in the B18, Ohio State has 3 complete games off, while only potentially being tested in 5 games, and 2 "hard" games.

A team like Georgia has 4 hard games, 2 games to be potentially tested, and then 2 easier games (their game against Kentucky is very similar to Ohio State vs. Nebraska).

Would be good to see the B18 get some of the dead weight up a lot so there aren't so many scrimmage games.