Kirby Smart Floats SEC Breakaway From the NCAA: Is the Conference Really Ready to Go Solo?
Kirby Smart just floated the most radical idea in college football. He thinks the SEC should consider leaving the NCAA behind.
The Georgia Bulldogs head coach said Tuesday that the Southeastern Conference should think about breaking off from the NCAA to set its own rules, including a possible SEC-only playoff. Smart told reporters that the league is strong enough to function on its own if a uniform rulebook cannot be agreed on across major college football.
“I’ve been a huge advocate that we can’t find rules that everybody played by, then we should play by our own. I’m not afraid of that,” Smart said, via Seth Emerson of The Athletic. “I’m not afraid to break away and say that our conference is strong enough to go out and have and play, I mean, like, if we could actually function and it financially would make our programs more stable.”
This Has Been Brewing for Years
Smart’s comments did not come out of nowhere. The SEC and Big Ten have been quietly running college football for years. They control the TV money. They control the playoff. They have absorbed every major brand that wanted out of the ACC and the Big 12. The idea that the NCAA still meaningfully governs the sport is a polite fiction.
What is actually happening is a slow-motion separation between the two power conferences and everyone else. NIL has accelerated it. The transfer portal has accelerated it. The House settlement has put real revenue-sharing money on the table for the first time. And the lack of uniform enforcement has frustrated coaches at the top of the sport.
Smart is the second-highest-paid coach in the country. He has won two national titles in the last five years. When he says the SEC should go solo, that is not a fringe opinion. That is a power broker testing the water.
Why It Probably Will Not Happen Soon
The actual breakup is harder than the rhetoric suggests. The SEC would have to handle its own enforcement, eligibility, championships, drug testing, and Olympic sports. It would have to decide what happens to non-revenue programs like baseball, gymnastics, and swimming. And it would have to convince schools that the upside of leaving the NCAA outweighs the legal mess of starting a new governing structure.
The Big Ten would also have a vote in this. If the SEC went alone, the Big Ten would either follow or merge into a super-conference. The Pac-12 is already dead. The Big 12 and ACC would be left holding a much weaker product.
What Smart Is Really Saying
Read between the lines and Smart is putting pressure on the NCAA and on other conferences to fall in line. He wants enforceable rules. He wants the lawless NIL collective wars to end. He wants the playoff expanded and structured in a way that benefits the SEC.
The threat to break away is leverage. The SEC has more leverage than any other conference in the sport. If the NCAA and the College Football Playoff committee do not deliver what Smart and his peers want, the breakaway moves from rhetoric to reality.
Right now nobody is happy with how college football is being run. Smart is the loudest voice saying that the SEC has the power to fix it on its own terms. Whether the conference actually pulls the trigger is the question that is going to define the next five years in college sports.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
