A link to the short story is below. It’s about 20 pages.
The TL;DR is, it turns out that traveling near light speed or FTL is almost trivially simple & a # of alien species figured it out early in their development. But because of this, most still don’t have modern weaponry or electricity, let alone advanced computing or manufacturing. They just stumbled into FTL tech & started conquering the galaxy like conquistadors. No need to develop all that other stuff. Meanwhile, for whatever reason, humans DIDN’T. Instead, we invested much more in other technologies throughout our history—manufacturing, computing, nuclear power, material science, etc. Which makes us humans seem kinda stupid….until that trivially simple FTL technology suddenly falls into our hands.
Which brings me back to the SEC pre & post NIL. Their monopoly on athlete talent meant they didn’t have to innovate on most other things. (Some did, but the competitive pressure wasn’t nearly as strong forcing it.) Meanwhile, if a non pay to play program wanted to be any good whatsoever, they had to squeeze every ounce of productivity from every other aspect: player development , scheme, play calling, etc. Then NIL democratizes player talent & suddenly those non SEC schools have a massive advantage. Not because they did anything wrong, but bc the SEC got caught resting on their laurels.
https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf