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It was only a small part of a larger story devoted to standout teams from across the college football landscape, but ESPN writer Chris Low caused a stir recently when he claimed that the Clemson Tigers, even with their loss to LSU in the national championship, had been “owning the SEC” since 2012 with victories, not only against Alabama, but against rival South Carolina, Georgia, LSU, Texas A&M and Auburn.

As Low pointed out, the Tigers are 15-6 against SEC teams during that period. Meanwhile, the team is 42-2 against ACC opponents since 2015.

Paul Finebaum, an analyst with the SEC Network, stated that Low’s statement was a “misleading” and an “outrageous proposition,” noting that much of Clemson’s success in the SEC comes from playing South Carolina, which has fallen to the Tigers the last six years. South Carolina, however, won five straight games against Clemson from 2009-2013 to give the Tigers an all-time record of 71-42-4 against their in-state rivals.

“A more intellectual way of approaching this would be to ponder what the record would be if Clemson had to play an SEC schedule with road games at Alabama and LSU opposed to Wake Forest and Boston College,” Finebaum said.

“Dabo is 13-5 against SEC teams (heading into last season). Saban is 57-5,” he added. “Which is more impressive? The SEC is the toughest conference in football. The ACC — outside of Clemson — is a clown show.”

Analyst Pete Fiutak seemed to agree, noting in a kind of backhanded compliment that while Clemson was undeniably “great,” if the team was placed in the SEC, the Tigers would be akin to Georgia; that is, a perennially competitive team, but rarely a top-echelon program.

“They might get through one (opponent) to get to a national championship,” Fiutak said. “But it’s one thing to go do what an Alabama’s done and go through LSU, Auburn, Mississippi State and the whole SEC world or else having to go through N.C. State – the Virginias of the world. It’s just a different animal.”

The contention, of course, is that Clemson has essentially padded its numbers with wins in the SEC against South Carolina and a few other contenders, but if the Tigers had to square up week in and week out against a full SEC schedule like Alabama, the Tigers would not have had as much success as the Crimson Tide.

Unlike Alabama, so the theory goes, the Tigers could not withstand the kind of weekly dose of stiff competition provided by the more consistent SEC, and so Clemson’s run at the top somehow means less because it does not preside over the top conference in the nation.

Finebaum went to high school in Memphis, Tenn., graduated college from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tenn., and is a well-known apologist for the SEC, so it makes sense that he would throw shade on the ACC, but we would be remiss if we didn’t point out the obvious flaws in his logic.

Alabama head coach Nick Saban had, indeed, run roughshod over the SEC, winning more than 90 percent of his games in the conference in recent years until last season. Would the Tigers have done the same if they were in Alabama’s position? We can’t possibly know the answer, but one has to believe that head coach Dabo Swinney would have brought the same level of preparation to each of his hypothetical SEC opponents as he did in his 42-2 run in the ACC the last five years.

What is without dispute is that Clemson has felled the SEC titleholder in two of the last four national championship games, so there is no reason to think that the Tigers could not have also handled any of the teams on Alabama’s regular season schedule.

Finebaum, of course, is one of a stubborn group of commentators who, even after Clemson’s two national championships and Swinney’s 11-year campaign to turn around a team that had flirted with mediocrity for the better part of two decades, continues groping in the dark for reasons why the Tigers and their ACC brethren will and forever lag behind the mighty SEC, facts be damned.

The point is that while the ACC admittedly had a down year in 2018, with only Syracuse cracking the top 20 at the end of the season, an objective look at the year-over-year results tells a different narrative from what Finebaum and others might want fans to believe, and to call a proud conference like the ACC a "clown show" after one season is disingenuous, at best, and disrespectful, at worst.