The SEC to Premier League Translation Guide

Author Daniel Gray nailed it.

In his collection of poems, Saturday, 3pm: 50 Eternal Delights of Modern Football, Gray described the football (soccer) fandom as “a temporary, recurring retreat, a short holiday from real existence. Our lives can be in chaos and nothing seem fixed. Nothing except how we feel on a Saturday at 3pm, when we are elevated into blissful and infuriating distraction. What a privilege that is.”

His words were intended to describe English football. But he also inadvertently nailed the American equivalent: college football in the American South. The two sports are worlds apart. Yet they’re mirror images of each other.

Rooted in the very fabric of the communities they occupy, football breathes life into largely forgotten places. Football is written in history. It gives its people something to hold onto. Something to identify with. Brings them together, and rips them apart. And for just a few hours on Saturdays, it gives people something to believe in.

Both sports are also driven by money. Lots and lots of money. And booze. But mostly money. Your worth in the English Premier League is often driven by the depth of your wallet. In the land of enigmatic and impatient billionaires, success can be hard to come by. It’s even harder to keep.

In SEC country, the state school puppet strings are tugged by oil-stained barrens, stealthy bagmen, snake-oil car salesmen and slick-talking lawyers. NIL translates into IOU. Secure the bag or that prized recruit will find someone who can.

I don’t know about you, but August truly can’t come soon enough.

Let’s get stuck in, and talk SEC-Premier League comps.

Darth Vader seethes with envy seeing what Nick Saban and Pep Guardiola have built.

Saban is unlike anything the sport has ever seen. He stacks 5-star talent like IHOP stacks pancakes, builds teams with machine-like efficiencies and for years, has completely overwhelmed his direct competition, and the sport as a whole.

Saban also managed to innovate, just when the sport started to catch up to him. He transformed his ground-and-pound road grater offense into one reliant on speed, skill and aerial efficiency. Pep did something similar. His ideology started with speed and skill. Now it’s about blunt force and trauma.

Both Saban and Pep have ushered in a level of dominance that hasn’t been seen before. And that we likely won’t see again.

There’s no shame in straddling the line of OK-Good. It’s even better when you occasionally punch above your weight class. That’s the Arkansas-Aston Villa experience.

Our beloved feral hogs have achieved a modicum of SEC success, and have integrated nicely since leaving the now-defunct Southwest Conference. Fayetteville is to the South as the West Midlands is to England. Weird location. Innately prideful fanbase.

Arkansas will probably never win a title. Neither will Aston Villa. Yet they’re perfectly fine with just existing and competing, depending on the year. That’s a good way to make a living if you ask me.

If Auburn Football and Chelsea Football Club were a movie, it would be Uncut Gems. The film features Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) as a Jewish-American jeweler and gambling addict. He can never relax. He refuses to chill. He’s always willing to win and risk it all, at a moment’s notice. He goes so far as to bet the tip-off result of an NBA playoff game. Totally unhinged behavior. Things are either really good or really bad and there’s no in-between.

This is the Auburn football experience.

Auburn has this uniquely fucked up culture where they devour themselves from the inside out. They’re driven by largely irresponsible and irrational boosters. Quick to hire, and quicker to fire. They’re either awesome or a train wreck.

And yet it works for them?

The same goes for Chelsea. They both love to chop and change. Have achieved the highest of highs, and love to fly ludicrously close to the lowest of lows. Both parties won’t think twice about sacrificing their morals for trophies (hello, Roman Abramovich and Hugh Freeze.)

The first step to being an Auburn fan (or Chelsea fan like I am) is to just lean in. Don’t get attached. Be ready for the worst. But just know that the best is out there and attainable and you’ll often find both sides of the seesaw in quick succession.

If you close your eyes during the Gator Bait song (and corresponding Gator Chomp motion), a little part of you feels like you’re at Goodison Park with the Z-Cars theme song blaring over the speakers.

Florida has a lot of Everton in them, and vice versa. Both Everton and Floria have an impressive history of famous coaches, have reached strong levels of success and play at an iconic ground. On the surface, they both look like they have exactly what they need to win. But it almost feels like the sport is passing them by.

Florida feels a step behind in the NIL game (as evidenced by the Jaden Rashada incident) and lacks their usual punch on the recruiting trail. Without a ton of recent success themselves, they’re stuck staring out the blinds at their neighbors, envious of their Georgia Bulldog-shaped pool.

Both Florida and Everton will always have that strong history to fall back on. But in a way maybe that’s part of the problem.

Georgia and Arsenal are the copy + paste versions of Alabama and Manchester City.

Kirby Smart studied under the tutelage of Nick Saban. As did Mikel Arteta with Pep Guardiola. Both coaches flew the nest and are winning big in their own way.

Let’s give Kirby (and Arteta) credit. The replica rarely lives up to the hype.

And yet Kirby is well on his way to building his own dynasty. He saw what worked for Saban and doubled down. More money. More talent. Bigger. Faster. Stronger. He’s fresh off back-to-back national titles and has a third within reach.

In his case, version 2.0 might surpass the original.

Kentucky will always be a small fish in a big pond. Surrounded by serial winners, they often get crowded out and overlooked. They’re not bad, per se, but they aren’t world-beaters. Far from it.

Kentucky is West Ham.

They can produce good moments. The Wildcats have shown moments of brilliance. Decent success even. But they are what they are. They’ll never be the big dog. Neither will the Hammers.

A history of successful coaches. Check.

Iconic venue. Check.

A cult-following level song. Check.

There’s a little Anfield magic inside the walls of Death Valley. LSU has an almost unbelievable hit rate on star players and national title-caliber coaches. They crush the recruiting trail (especially in their own backyard.) And there’s always something special watching them when they’ve got it going.

This mirrors the Liverpool effect.

If you mix in a pinch of Les Miles, a dash of Ed Orgeron and the faaaaaaamily mating call of Brian Kelly, you just might get a Jurgen Klopp regen.

Mississippi State has no business being a good SEC team. Under any circumstance.

They’re in the middle of bum fuck nowhere. Built off the back of a cut-rate budget. And have none of the history or mystique of their counterparts.

And yet…not that long ago, they took the country by storm. Just like the Foxes.

Let’s time travel back to 2014-2015.

Led by Dan Mullen, the Bulldogs sparked a miracle run. They peaked at No. 1 in the nation, graced the cover of Sports Illustrated and for a few short weeks, truly felt on top of the world.

A year later, Leceister City did the same. The Foxes pulled off the unthinkable at 5000/1 odds. They David’d the Goliath Premier League. With a rag-tag bunch, they shocked the footballing world and won the title.

I don’t give a shit about Mizzou or Southampton. Both teams are lucky to just be here.

And as of today, Southampton can’t even say that.

In a similar vein to their Bulldog counterparts, Ole Miss isn’t designed to win in the modern-day SEC. But with a cool, cocky coach they’ve become a fun team and are now regularly hanging with the big boys.

Hello, Brighton & Hove Albion.

Both teams are unremarkable in a traditional sense. But with the help of good recruitment and brilliant offensive minds pulling the strings, they’ve risen from relative obscurity to punch above their weight class. Kiffin and De Zerbi made them cool – which is really hard to comprehend when you think about it.

But as fate will have it, when their hipster coach leaves, they’ll more than likely plummet right back down to Earth again.

The Sooners are uniquely themselves.

They’ve got some serious winning to their name. They have incredibly prideful fans. And they’ll soon be welcomed to the SEC. But it’s hard to gauge whether it’ll feel like they truly belong.

Oklahoma gives me Leeds vibes.

Trade the crimson and cream for the all-white Leeds kit.

South Carolina just kind of hangs out over in the corner, tries not to make ruffle too many feathers (pun intended) and is largely happy to be here.

The Gamecocks are niche. They’ve got a real Wolves feel to them.

Whenever I see a South Carolina or Wolves fan, I think the same exact thing.

How the hell did you become a Wolves/Gamecocks fan?

*In the most Peyton Manning QB voice possible*

It’s fun to be a Tennessee fan again!

Tennessee is an SEC blue blood but in recent years, fell on hard times. Then out of nowhere, they got a coach that no one thought anything of and now they’re good again.

It kind of mirrors the Newcastle experience.

Both the Vols and Magpies have experienced a newfound bump in success. They both have crazy loyal fanbases. Got some money to play with. And made what some believed was an obscure hire. When in truth, it was absolutely the best thing for them.

While it doesn’t quite feel like ‘98, I’m sure Tennessee is hoping Josh Heupel can be their Eddie Howe and spark some consistent winning in Knoxville.

Texas A&M’s 2022 season might as well have been the sequel to Fyre Fest. It was an unmitigated disaster in every sense of the word.

5-7 overall. 2-6 in SEC play. No bowl game. Millions of dollars wasted. Abject failure. Nothing worthwhile to show for it. And a guy as the face of it all who seems more delusional by the day?

Texas A&M is Tottenham. They play in the same sandbox as the big boys but have none of the success. They’re posers. They want more than anything to win and win big, but they just can’t reach it. From the outside, they look desperate and sad. Funny enough, those are two ways to accurately sum up the fanbase too.

A&M and Spuds are the laughingstocks of their league. I don’t see it changing anytime soon.

Texas football is a gigantic, brand-new Ram 1500 truck. This truck is sick. I mean, really sick. It’s lifted. Has the dopest rims. And it’s got a speaker system that makes your neighbors hate you.

This truck looks really cool. It makes you feel important. It’s a 10-gallon hat-level status symbol.

But it doesn’t do the one thing that’s important: run. Not reliably at least.

That’s the Texas football and Manchester United experience.

The Longhorns and Red Devils have arguably the most storied histories of the bunch. Ridiculously good coaches. A laundry list of great players. And the best facilities money can buy.

But they aren’t as good as they should be. In a lot of ways, they’re a letdown.

I don’t have a great fix for either team. They’ve both tried to throw a ton of cash at the problem in hopes it goes away. It hasn’t. They’ve tried out-of-the-box coaching hires and that didn’t work either.

And to be fair, they both have seemingly good coaches now and it feels like they have a plan. Let’s see if they can get that motor running.

Vanderbilt doesn’t have a lot of success to hold onto. But they did go undefeated in 1904. And that’s something. Sprinkled in there over 100 years later, James Franklin got the ‘Dores cookin’ and parlayed that job into a much bigger job.

Vandy feels very Nottingham Forest to me. The Tricky Trees won the European Cup final in 1979 and that’s about it. But to their credit, this year they were back in the top flight and will be sticking around next year.

As we march through the long, hot, dog days of summer. I’ll leave you with this.

No matter whether you’re into touchdowns or trebles. Bagmen or billionaires. NIL or VAR. Alabama or England.

The truth remains the same.

In the Premier League and the SEC, it just means more.