Brady Hoke: SEC not only league that plays football
Michigan's Brady Hoke said fans are 'overly zealous' when it comes to the strength of the SEC, and he defended the Big Ten.
By
Jerry Hinnen
•
2 min read
Unlike the Oklahoma coach, who took a direct shot at the SEC's depth and called its reputation "propaganda," Michigan's Brady Hoke didn't argue that the SEC was any kind of paper tiger. But Hoke's comments on Cleveland radio this week and reported Friday by Detroit's mlive.com do show that, like Stoops, he's tiring of the assumption that the SEC is the only league that matters.
"I think people get a little overly zealous when they think the SEC is where they play football," Hoke said. "I think when you look at the track record of the Big Ten, [we] play awfully good football."
Not necessarily against the SEC, though, they don't; as mlive.com points out, the Big Ten has gone 2-7 against the SEC the past three bowl seasons. (Thanks to the vagaries of bowl assignments, though, it's worth noting that the Big Ten was the underdog in most of those games.) Hoke's Wolverines happened to collect one of the losses against South Carolina last January, in what most will remember as the Jadeveon Clowney hit game.
But what is driving Hoke's frutration likely isn't that loss or the Big Ten's record vs. the SEC.
"I really believe in this conference, and everyone has to recruit the way they need to recruit for their school," Hoke said of the Big Ten. "It's an amazing conference of coaches that work awfully hard."
Why the recruiting reference? Why the ever-so-subtle implication that "everyone has to" pull their weight on the trail? Maybe because outside of Hoke's Wolverines and Urban Meyer's Buckeyes, the Big Ten has plenty of work to do in recruiting. In 2013, Michigan and Ohio State were the only Big Ten teams to finish in the top 20 of the final 247Sports team rankings, and Nebraska was the only other Big Ten school in the top 25. Though there are now six Big Ten teams in the current 2014 rankings, four of them are grouped from 21 to 25, with the Huskers the next-highest team at No. 38.
Those rankings can and will change between now and signing day, but it's not clear if that means they'll get better or worse for the Big Ten. As Brian Cook of MGoBlog recently detailed, Kentucky's recruiting push into the Buckeye State under Ohio-connected Mark Stoops -- eight of the Wildcats' 18 current commitments in their seventh-ranked class hail from Ohio -- has meant several quality recruits that might otherwise have played for the Big Ten's middle class will instead play for one of the SEC's traditional doormats. Among the top 20 recruits in Ohio for 2014, Kentucky's commitments double the number for all Big Ten schools other than Michigan and Ohio State, four to two. Thanks to Butch Jones' Cincinnati connections, Tennessee's surprising class also includes two recruits from Ohio and one from Illinois.
If that trend continues, it will make the SEC East that much stronger, the Big Ten's rank and file that much weaker, and the schedules for Hoke and Meyer -- who also complained not so long ago about the Big Ten's recruiting -- that much more of a hindrance as they chase a playoff berth.
Why does Brady Hoke care about the college football world being "overly zealous" about the SEC? Because, most likely, that zealousness is making the "come play in the SEC" argument that much more effective -- and it's an argument that's tangibly damaging his league and his program.
