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The Sun Belt champion is unlikely to make this year’s College Football Playoff. This is not unusual. Since the Sun Belt started sponsoring football, beginning in 2001, no Sun Belt team has ever made a BCS or New Year’s Six bowl. The MAC, AAC, Mountain West, and Conference USA have all sent a representative to college football’s bigger stage. The Sun Belt has not.
What’s unusual about the Sun Belt this year is that it’s probably the best Group of Five conference.
In our model’s most recent simulations, the Sun Belt sends a team to the CFP less than half as often as the American Athletic Conference. The Mountain West leads the Sun Belt handily in this metric as well. In playoff likelihood, the Sun Belt is closer to the MAC and Conference USA than it is to the AAC and MWC. In terms of quality, however, the Sun Belt’s pretty good. Better, in fact, than both those leagues. Movelor, our model’s rating system, says the average Sun Belt team would be favored by more than half a point over the average AAC team or average MWC team:
| Conference | Expected Playoff Teams | Average Movelor Rating |
| Sun Belt | 0.196 | 7.1 |
| American | 0.475 | 6.4 |
| Mountain West | 0.353 | 6.2 |
| MAC | 0.178 | 0.3 |
| Conference USA | 0.150 | -0.7 |
How is this the case?
There are two things that question can mean. The first is: How come the better conference has the poorer playoff shot?
The short version is that while the AAC and Mountain West have a few legitimately good teams and a few very bad teams, the Sun Belt is lumped more tightly together. Create three parallel universes in which the same football team plays in each of the three leagues, and that hypothetical team would likely achieve the worst results in its Sun Belt universe. The Sun Belt is better, right now, than any of the other mid-major leagues.
The second version of the question is a little less wonky. How did the Sun Belt get good?
23 years ago, when the Sun Belt first sponsored football, it had seven teams: Middle Tennessee, Louisiana–Lafayette, Louisiana–Monroe, Arkansas State, Idaho, New Mexico State, and North Texas. The latter four on that list came over from the Big West, which had stopped sponsoring football. The first three came from Division I-A independence, having stepped up to I-A from I-AA within the prior decade.
It was a really bad league.
North Texas ruled the conference in its early years, winning at least a share of the first four Sun Belt championships. North Texas was not a good football team in those early years, going a combined 4–20 in out-of-conference games. In 2004, North Texas went 7–0 within the Sun Belt and 0–5 outside it. In 2001, North Texas went 5–1 inside the Sun Belt and 0–6 outside it. North Texas earned bowl eligibility in 2001 through an exception, because they were a conference co-champion. North Texas lost that bowl game by 25 points.
The Sun Belt remained a doormat for a long time. Primarily, it was a conference for schools to move in and out of, many while charting a new FBS course. Utah State joined, then left alongside Idaho and New Mexico State for the WAC. FIU and FAU joined, then left alongside Middle Tennessee and North Texas for Conference USA. Idaho and New Mexico State at one point came back, only to get kicked out when the NCAA started allowing leagues with ten schools to play conference championship games. Of those original seven teams, only three remain in the league. The other eleven have all joined over these last 23 years.
Where did the eleven come from? Where did Idaho and New Mexico State go? Those are the two key stories in how the Sun Belt grew to become what it currently is. First, let’s look at where each current Sun Belt team spent the 2001 college football season. In cases where the name the team plays under has changed over the last 23 years, I’ve included the now-omitted words in parentheses.
- Appalachian State: Southern Conference (I-AA)
- Arkansas State: Sun Belt
- Coastal Carolina: No football program (until 2003)
- Georgia Southern: Southern Conference (I-AA)
- Georgia State: No football program (until 2010)
- James Madison: Atlantic 10 (I-AA)
- Louisiana(–Lafayette): Sun Belt
- Louisiana–Monroe: Sun Belt
- Marshall: MAC
- Old Dominion: No football program (until 2009)
- South Alabama: No football program (until 2009…ish)
- Southern Miss: Conference USA
- (Southwest) Texas State: Southland (I-AA)
- Troy (State): I-A Independent
23 years ago, three of the Sun Belt’s fourteen teams were in the Sun Belt. Four of them didn’t exist. Four were playing at what’s now the FCS level. The remaining three were spread across Conference USA, the MAC, and independent status, with Troy having just left the Southland after the 2000 season to make its FBS transition.
How did the Sun Belt get good? Partly by luck, and partly through its own shrewdness.
Over the course of the 1990’s, 2000’s, and 2010’s, people realized just how popular college football is in the southeast. College football’s popularity probably also increased over this timeframe, but whether it changed or not, more people took notice. Through the performance of Nick Saban, Phillip Fulmer, Steve Spurrier, and Urban Meyer, SEC football took clear leadership within the sport. The region responded, and slowly but surely, more and more schools added football programs or moved their football programs into the FBS.
We’ll try to run a bigger post on this ongoing change later this season, because it has not been national in its nature. The short version is that upshifts and downshifts in college football track depressingly closely to geographic voting patterns. It may well be that the sport’s gotten caught in the culture war. However it happened, there was an influx of college football in the southeast. Much of it—Georgia Southern, App State, JMU, and Marshall combined for 13 FCS titles—was good. A good situation fell into the Sun Belt’s lap.
Still, the Sun Belt had to take advantage of it.
A turning point came when the Sun Belt kicked out Idaho and NMSU. It’s always sad when schools are rendered homeless in the conference landscape, and NMSU hasn’t exactly landed on its feet. (Idaho has downshifted to the FCS but has enjoyed success there, competing with Montana and Montana State in the Big Sky.) For the Sun Belt, though, the consolidation to ten schools produced a competent, competitive conference. In 2018, the first year post-eviction, three Sun Belt schools won ten or eleven games. In 2019, App State went 13–1 and finished the season ranked. 2020 saw Coastal Carolina and Louisiana in the New Year’s Six picture late in the year. In the summer and fall of 2021, the Sun Belt really turned on the jets, capitalizing off of the success of those three schools to court Southern Miss, Old Dominion, and Marshall after the American raided Conference USA. They also landed JMU, the second-best FCS program since App State made its FBS leap. Once, Conference USA was better enough than the Sun Belt to pluck four of its members at once. Now, the Sun Belt was returning the favor.
The result is a healthy, geographically cohesive league headlined by strong football. The Sun Belt is exactly what fans want in college sports today. It’s not the SEC in terms of its dominance, but it’s easy to see how it could head that direction within the Group of Five landscape. There are a lot of good programs here. There’s a quietly large amount of history. The schools are similar institutions to one another, with enough differences to foster some legitimate antipathy between fanbases. The Sun Belt is, true to its name, a ray of light, a success story born out of the same forces which tore the Pac-12 apart.
Tonight, App State plays South Alabama. It’s not the biggest game of the Sun Belt season. South Alabama’s 1–2, and not a particularly good 1–2. The Mountaineers are a respectable 2–1, but the degree by which Clemson beat them likely precludes serious playoff consideration unless they both run the table and turn on the jets while doing it. Still, it’s a good game, and that says a lot about how far this conference has come. It used to be that even the consequential Sun Belt games were bad. Now, the less consequential games are good. That’s hard progress to achieve in the college football universe.
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If you missed it yesterday, our Week 4 preview is up. If you didn’t miss it, well, it’s still there. As always, more to come tomorrow.
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