Just ask Bill Connelly.
The way things currently stand, we could have an incredible SEC race on our hands.
East F/+ Ranking Proj. conf. wins Missouri (1-0, 4-1) 29 5.17 Georgia (1-1, 3-1) 16 4.66 South Carolina (2-2, 3-2) 26 4.12 Florida (1-1, 2-1) 37 3.86 Tennessee (0-1, 2-2) 47 3.11 Kentucky (1-1, 3-1) 76 2.22 Vanderbilt (0-3, 1-4) 98 0.74 West F/+ Ranking Proj. conf. wins Mississippi State (1-0, 4-0) 7 5.54 Alabama (1-0, 4-0) 1 5.38 Ole Miss (1-0, 4-0) 5 5.23 Texas A&M (2-0, 5-0) 11 4.88 Auburn (1-0, 4-0) 8 4.73 LSU (0-1, 4-1) 10 4.08 Arkansas (0-2, 3-2) 24 2.27 Those are three East teams projected within 1.05 wins of the top spot … and those are five West teams projected within 0.8. That’s incredible. This is something you tend to see when projecting lower-caliber conferences without standout teams. This isn’t what you expect from the best conference in the country (and while the SEC is not the best every year, it absolutely is this year).
That is about as up for grabs as you can get. That’s also why this is a huge, huge weekend in the SEC West.
Yeah, it’s been easy putting my Power Poll ballot together.
Get The Picture 
I’m nowhere near as smart as Bill, not even in the same ballpark, but I’ve been saying since we lost to SC that it wouldn’t surprise me if the winner of the East comes out of a 5-3 conference record tiebreaker. And on Bill’s chart titled “Odds of SEC Conference Records”, the highest odds for UGA, SC, and Mizzou in fact all lie at 5-3.
Gotta admit it surprised me that his stats show basically the same thing for the West though. MSU is the only one whose odds are currently higher at 6-2 than at 5-3. Gonna be real interesting, and probably real frustrating, to see how all this plays out.
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Correction, only Mizzou and UGA have the highest odds of ending 5-3. SC and UF’s highest odds are at 4-4.
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This ain’t good for getting a second team considered for the playoffs..
But when it goes to 8 (as it will) the SEC should get two in most years and three in some years.
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I think Tennessee will beat Florida, although I think we need to be pulling for Florida for a few reasons.
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Just curious, what reasons do you think we should be pulling for Florida? I’m not disputing, just wondering. I’m not sure how I feel about which result helps more than the other.
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Gotta pull for the meteor.
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+1
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Gonna be a bad look for the East if a team that lost to Indiana ends up winning the division.
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Florida is not improving, at least it hasn’t looked like it so far this season.
Tennessee is building.
Tennessee recruits heavily in Georgia (UF does too, but they’re hurting and also have a lot of talent in Fl….TN has little to nothing in high school talent>
Tennessee could actually win the East, though it’s a long shot. Florida is a long, long shot.
I’ll grant you that these aren’t compelling reasons. The biggest reason is that I think Tennessee may be on the verge of being very good. Some of their fans are acting as if they won in Athens (moral victory, I suppose) and are already counting Georgia as a win in Knoxville for next year. The hillbilly fans are currently raucous and arrogant while the Florida fans are beat-down and being quiet.
But I’m not sure who we should be for. What do you think? What did I miss?
(Oh, that awful 1950’s style checkerboard crap they do in their dank old stadium is sickening…and if you watch you’ll get sick of it very quickly…and “Rocky Top”….it’s all enough for ME to hope they lose…Esp. since it is in Knoxville.
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Hahaha, yeah you have valid points. There’s no doubt that UT has more of the feel of a team on the rise. You are looking long term (recruiting, next season, etc) where I was just focusing on which result helps us more towards winning the East this year, but ultimately it really shouldn’t impact that either way as both should finish below us. So it makes sense to take more of a long term view like you laid out above.
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I want Florida to lose every week before they play us so that Boom’s fate is sealed and he’s not “coaching for his job” in Jax.
Gotta look at all the short-term angles before considering the long-term considerations.
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We beat Tennessee, I pull for UT in this one. With any luck, UF will crash & burn, hire some SODooley-like guy, and waffle through several horrible seasons. UT is getting better, sure, but I don’t think they’ll be the heavy in the division next year (or the year after that).
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Find a typical Vol fan…they’re already dusting off a place on the mantle for the SEC Championship Trophy. I want Butch Jones to have to explain to recruits how they can’t win an SEC game, even to the Muschampions at home.
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Winning the next two games is huge for us.
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Two Mississippi schools in the top ten? Where the f am I?
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I think that all comes crashing down soon, Miss State looks to be the one that may hang around near the top of the West, imo. Agree with Bill about the closeness in each division regarding getting to Atlanta but I don’t recall the SEC not being best in decades.
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Wait…I don’t understand, I thought we were gonna be favored in all our remaining games…how can we be favored….ah hell, never mind.
Four quarters of Vandy.
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Lol. I thought the same thing.
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Amazing that we’re entering week 6 and so many schools have only played 1 conference game so far. Adding the 12th regular season game was such a waste.
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Waste not, want not
http://www.lovethispic.com/uploaded_images/60788-I-Love-Cupcakes.gif?1
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“This isn’t what you expect from the best conference in the country (and while the SEC is not the best every year, it absolutely is this year).”
Big Game Bob does not have time for this
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Georgia will likely beat Vandy, Kentucky and FU, Arkansas may be a hard out. Auburn will be a tough game. I’m guessing Georgia will lose one of those. Bottom line: Because SC lost to Mizzou and Georgia already has a conference loss to the Chickens, Georgia has to beat Mizzou in Columbia, MO to win the East. If Georgia loses to Mizzou, the Dawgs can run the table on the rest of the conference games and not win the East. Georgia would have 2 conference losses (USC and Mizzou) and Mizzou would have the tiebreaker over the Dawgs. Mizzou would have to lose 3 SEC games in the rest of its schedule for Georgia to win the East, at that point. Bottom line: Georgia has to beat Mizzou at Mizzou to win the East. But why not? Indiana did.
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I too think the Mizzoe game is crucial. We can’t lose the tie breaker to Mizzou and Carolina and expect to be in the Dome.
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“Bottom line: Georgia has to beat Mizzou at Mizzou to win the East. But why not? Indiana did.”
Fully agree, Mr. Mayor. Indiana has nothing even remotely comparable to Todd Gurley, among other disparities in talent and numbers. If we didn’t have half of our troops in sick bay last year, we would have mugged Missouri. That was the game the injury albatross caught up with us.
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Exactly. Gurley stays healthy and Georgia plays grown man football once again in Columbia.
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Mizzou ends the season at A&M, at Tennessee, and then at home against Arky. They could easily lose two or all three of those games. Time to start looking at tiebreakers.
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The SEC is truly going you eat itself alive, keeping it from having two teams in the playoffs, and also keeping it from showing how truly dominant it can be.
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Eh. All of this will come out in the wash, and we’ll end up with a 7-1 or 6-2 team from the East playing an 8-0 or 7-1 team from the West. My money’s on Alabama-Georgia, but we’ll see. I will go ahead and predict that both Mississippi schools go down pretty hard this weekend.
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How is it that Missouri….Missouri…Missouri has become a top contender in our league and in our division? Their best years were in the 60’s with a shining moment in 2007. This is not a traditional power from the Big 12/Big 8.
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I’ll take a stab at that, Beaker. Missouri caught the wind of a perfect storm in the SEC E. in it’s sails last year….(I present Cannon Dogs comment above as an argument). This year, they have beat SC, but that may be about it. They wouldn’t have won last year with a half-way healthy UGA team and they still have a lot of tough games this year. But being in the SEC will help them recruiting and they will be a factor from here on out. But right now, they’re Missouri playing with a golden horseshoe.
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IS the SEC the best this year? I’m not so sure that right now everyone in the conference isn’t overrated. The WWL talks us up bigger than ever now, and that can’t just be coincidence. Ole Miss in the top 10? For what, exactly?
Nobody stands out and that may be a bad thing, not an indicator of conference strength.
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Depends on how you term “over rated”. If you mean most will finish lower in the polls by the time the year is out, I agree. But the reason for the fall will be because there are so many teams capable of beating you (and most everyone else in the country.) No way top dodge them, even if you think the East is weak, we just don’t know yet, you don’t get a pass, you still have to play the winner from the big, bad West.
The polls go by Ws and Ls only, being in the SEC guarantees you will have more than 1-2 very good teams to beat every year, and several that have equal or better talent. Arkansas has two losses but crushed TT and N Illinois. Losing to Auburn and A&M on the road in competitive games tells me they might should be rated although they do not have a winning record. I would say that UGA, Ole Miss, and probably LSU are over rated at this time, things change
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