As Jack Sawyer lumbered 83 yards for a touchdown to end Texas' upset bid in the Cotton Bowl, reality sank in.

Stick a fork in the SEC. Again.

Another year, another missed shot at a national title.

I say that a bit tongue-in-cheek knowing that 2 years without an SEC team in the College Football Playoff National Championship is basically an eternity. It's the first such drought for the conference since the 2004-05 seasons. Of course, then the SEC responded with nothing but national championship victories from 2006-12, thanks to 4 different programs. No other conference has had 4 different programs win a title in the 21st century, though that's an afterthought given the current context of the sport.

So let's provide some real context for what the SEC wasn't in 2024, and perhaps what it could still be, despite tweets like this that are assuming the SEC is dead because of its worst 2-year championship stretch in 2 decades.

While I respect Pat Forde's track record of providing totally unbiased takes about all things SEC -- the "times are a-changin'" line is actually a callback to a Bob Dylan lyric that Greg Sankey quoted at 2015 SEC Media Days and multiple times since then -- let's examine the facts.

When that aforementioned 2006-12 streak of titles was followed with 2 years of SEC-less national champs, what was the narrative after Ohio State beat Alabama in the 2014 Sugar Bowl? It was "step aside, SEC. Your time is over."

Spoiler alert: It wasn't.

From 2015-22, the SEC had a team in every national title game and it won 6 of those 8 championships. Three different schools accounted for that, too. Again, we're still waiting on 3 different programs from any other conference to claim 21st century national titles, but I digress.

Predicting the SEC's demise is always going to be low-hanging fruit as long as the conference has its bravado. It's fair to say the 12-team Playoff magnified that when 3-loss teams like Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina all made their respective cases to earn a spot in the field over an SMU team that didn't lose an ACC game in the regular season. And when 11-1 Indiana got smoked by Notre Dame in the first round of the Playoff, well, I don't have to remind you which fan bases were the loudest.

Let's call it like it is, though. It wasn't exactly a storybook season for the SEC. Having only 3 teams in the Playoff was a disappointment, as was the fact that newbie Texas was the lone SEC participant that won a Playoff game. It was a down postseason for the conference, much like 2014 when that aforementioned Alabama loss to Ohio State capped an 0-3 New Year's 6 bowl record for the SEC in the first year of the new format.

Seeing the similarities yet? Back then, it was "see what happens when you actually play the games instead of letting the SEC just have an automatic bid to the title game?" It's similar now.

Oh, in case you were wondering, the SEC's next 9 years of New Year's 6 bowl games during the 4-team Playoff included a 26-8 record.

But hey, the times were apparently changing then.

It's true that the times are changing now. Between NIL, the transfer portal and the upcoming revenue-sharing model, the times are changing in ways the sport never has. For some, those dots being connected are that the talent is being spread out in ways that it hasn't before, and the SEC's inherent regional/financial/talent advantage is gone. Never mind the fact that the SEC had 6 of the top 10 teams in the 247sports talent composite rankings in 2024, or the fact that the SEC had the most NFL Draft picks (59) for the 18th consecutive year. After all, that's in the past.

Also in the past is a down SEC season ... wherein it still went 13-7 vs. other Power Conference opponents in the regular season:

But hey, that doesn't fit the "SEC is no longer on top" narrative.

(Poor, ACC. Not only did it barely get a second team into the 12-team Playoff, but the conference continued its winless streak in New Year's 6/Playoff games in the 2020s decade.)

What's true is that the SEC might not run the sport like it once did during its 2 notable 21st-century stretches of dominance. Whether you want to connect that entirely to the greatest coach in college football history stepping down, that's your call. Kalen DeBoer also coached more recently in a national championship than anyone else in the SEC, so take that for what it is.

If the conference's 2-decade run was just a byproduct of the Nick Saban era in Tuscaloosa in sort of a "rising tide lifts all boats" situation (pun intended), we're going to need at least 3 years of those other talent-rich SEC programs falling off. Early indications would tend to suggest that's not imminent. Find a way-too-early ranking for 2025 that doesn't have at least 4 SEC teams in the top 10 with roughly 7 teams inside the Top 25.

Take way-too-early rankings for what they are, but if the entire argument is "the SEC isn't stockpiling talent the way it used to," doesn't that suggest the conference's demise might not be so imminent if early projections still default to returning roster talent?

The SEC has been the standard of the sport in the 21st century, and when it fails to live up to that, the chants are heard far and wide. No, not "S-E-C! S-E-C!" It's instead "O-VER-RA-TED! O-VER-RA-TED!"

Maybe the SEC was actually properly rated in 2024. It lacked a truly elite team, which was why every SEC program went into the postseason with at least 2 conference losses. To be fair, we're watching a title game between 2 teams that wouldn't have even made the field in the 4-team Playoff era. Notre Dame's Northern Illinois collapse as a 28-point favorite will be an all-time head-scratcher, and Ohio State flipped the switch post-Michigan loss and is now playing like an elite team. But if the Buckeyes take care of business as significant title-game favorites, the takeaway of the season could just simply be that one team maximized a $20 million roster and everyone else was second fiddle. It happens.

Of course, up until Sawyer's lumbering run, Texas did its best to end that narrative. It certainly came much closer than the lone FBS unbeaten in the regular season, Oregon, which rolled through the Big Ten in its first year of the conference. But that context isn't as irrelevant when it comes to burying the SEC.

More relevant is the SEC is now tasked with adapting to this ever-changing sport. History tells us that won't be an issue, though that doesn't guarantee the next 20 years will look like the previous 20. Times will continue to be a-changin'.