It's Hypocritical Not To Want Alabama in the SEC Championship: Just a Minute

Welcome to BamaCentral’s "Just a Minute," a video series featuring Alabama Crimson Tide on SI's beat writers. Multiple times per week, the writers will group up or film solo to provide their take on a topic concerning the Crimson Tide or the landscape of college sports.

Watch the above video as Alabama Crimson Tide on SI's Theo Fernandez questions narratives about the importance of the SEC Championship Game.

The SEC Championship Game will be played for the final time next month, and almost nobody cares.

Let's correct that. Almost nobody actually cares. They "care" in the sense that they want to take to social media to rant about how the College Football Playoff expansion is awful, and the sport is being ruined. But when it comes time to discuss actually playing in the game, there's a prevailing takeaway from most of the schools in the running: they don't want to.

What?

You want to bemoan the changes happening in the sport, you want to talk about how there's no regionality left in college football, and you don't want to see your school play in the last ever conference championship game?

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If the SEC truly "just means more," then shouldn't the chance to say you were the last school to win its championship mean a whole lot? Shouldn't the risk of injury or lost playoff prep time be worth it for the opportunity to go to Atlanta?

Alabama's 11 SEC Championship Game wins are the most in the conference. Shouldn't the push for No. 12 be priority No. 1 right now in Tuscaloosa?

Kalen DeBoer echoed that sentiment in Monday's press conference.

"As competitive people here at Alabama, we want to win that game," DeBoer said. "We're going to play as hard as we can right now and want to be in that game because that's what the schedule is and what the goals are."

It's fascinating to see that there are people who don't agree with him.

If the SEC Championship doesn't matter, the conference doesn't matter. If fanbases care so much more about the playoff than being able to say they won the final iteration of a historic game, then it is abundantly clear the decision to eradicate it was the correct one.

Food for thought as we enter the home stretch of the season.

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