Now, I don't fault the SEC for this. There is a power vacuum and the SEC has decided to fill it. Good for them. But it was going to provoke a response, and people get petty when they are afraid.
One reason I preferred the idea of a 4 super-conference setup (with the SEC doing a much less dramatic addition of North Carolina and Virginia for example) was not because I didn't want the SEC to dominate. I've always considered the SEC's power an extension of Alabama's power. I just preferred the frog in a pot approach to the SEC achieving dominance.
Now, the SEC has thrown down the gauntlet, their intentions can not be mistaken. They aim to take over college football. Unfortunately, I think people in the south and perhaps the SEC might be underestimating the difficulty of that task. It's one thing to win championships, it's another thing to find a way to establish control of the entire sport. The SEC was just catching up financially to the Big 10, now they seem to have drawn the ire of all the other power conferences.
I'm not sure people realize how bumpy this can get. For instance, what if the other conferences start to refuse to schedule the SEC? The committee will have representation from the Big 10, ACC, Pac-12 and the Big 12 as long as it's alive. They could quite easily decide on de facto conference championship requirements. They've already kicked Texas off the committee and a couple conferences have expressed hesitancy in expanding the playoff (presumably to prevent the SEC from dominating it).
This fight can continue elsewhere of course, with the Big 12 trying to stick it to ESPN/Oklahoma/Texas and in doing so keep the SEC teams from seeing any increase in revenue for years, essentially adding Texas and Oklahoma just for the fun of it. This fight could continue to the NCAA, where every conference not named the SEC could argue for keeping a lot of restrictions in place (the SEC in turn would try to strong-arm the NCAA by threatening to leave). The problem is the SEC hasn't mustered the political and regional power required for such a move. Even with 60 million+ per year payed out to 16 teams, that's no match for the combined might of conferences that pay out over 2 billion annually.
To me the question of who wins will be a matter of how organized the resistance becomes. If the SEC doesn't figure out how to win decisively, and in the relatively near future things could get really interesting once the other forces start to make their moves.
Of course, this might actually means a lot less to you or I. Ohio State and Alabama will end up on the winning side sooner or later anyway. This poses a far greater threat to programs like Vanderbilt, Rutgers, Duke, and Utah.