Bret Bielema picked a familiar target when he weighed in on the Big 10 and SEC this week, and he did it with a line that was bound to get attention.
Speaking Tuesday, the Illinois head coach said the SEC has a mindset that feels stuck in the past.
“Everyone's going to have opinions, and obviously, they're going to draw the Big 10-SEC, all that that goes around about that," Bielema said Tuesday. "Sitting in the room with both of those guys, with Tony and the vision and experience that he has, and to be in the room [wtih] Sankey...
I know he's got to protect the SEC and they kind of want to live in 2005 forever. But I think the forward thinking of where we are in college football is an awesome thing."
The timing mattered, too. Bielema’s remarks came just a week after SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said discussions about the SEC potentially breaking away from the NCAA were real.
The 2005 reference is a loaded one in Arkansas, even if the season itself is probably best left in the past for Razorbacks fans. That year, Arkansas went 4-7 and won only two SEC games, though freshman Darren McFadden gave the season its brightest spot.
There’s also a bit of irony baked into the whole thing. The 2005 national championship game was Texas against USC, a matchup between schools that now sit in the SEC and Big 10, respectively. Texas won that Rose Bowl classic 41-38 in one of the most memorable games college football has ever produced.
What makes Bielema’s comments land the way they do is his own track record. He was a powerhouse at Wisconsin, going 68-24 and reaching the Rose Bowl in three straight seasons before taking the Arkansas job.
But the SEC chapter never matched that success. In five seasons with the Razorbacks, Bielema finished 29-34 overall and went 11-29 in conference play.
That included a winless SEC season in 2013 and a 4-8 finish in 2017, when Arkansas was 1-7 in league games. He was fired after a 48-45 loss to Missouri, walking off Frank Broyles field after that season finale.
Bielema is also the last Arkansas coach to post a winning SEC record, thanks to the Razorbacks’ 5-3 mark in conference play in 2015, when they finished tied for third in the SEC West.
Still, if the goal was to spark a broader Big 10-SEC debate, Bielema may have given Arkansas and SEC fans exactly the opening they wanted. The response has already come back fast, with plenty of reminders of his Arkansas record. Whether that changes anything around Sankey’s thinking is another matter, but it did make for one of the more pointed - and unintentionally funny - moments of talking season.
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