I think the SEC bias elevates these teams in some people’s minds. If you overrate certain teams before the season they have to lose a lot of games before people start to believe they were overrated. Meanwhile, the teams that are beating them are still getting a boost.
So, for the sake of discussion, if you overrate LSU, Tennessee, Kentucky and Texas A&M before the season starts, then any team that beats them gets an artificial boost, especially when evidence suggests these are just average teams. So, even though these teams were beaten by some good teams, not every team that beat them was necessarily good. Florida shouldn’t get an extra large boost for beating Tennessee, for instance, especially if Tennessee is demonstrating that they are an average team. Missouri shouldn’t be seen as a good team because they dominated Kentucky. Ole Miss shouldn’t get a boost from squeaking by LSU, especially when other teams have beaten LSU much more convincingly.
There are a lot of mediocre teams in the SEC but they get a boost by simply being in the SEC. So teams like South Carolina and Missouri, just to name two, can expose the weaknesses of a better team, either by beating them or playing them close, and it doesn’t have the same impact as Miami losing to Ga Tech, or UNC losing to Virginia, or Louisville losing to Pittsburgh.