Which SEC team got the easiest draw with their current lot of three-team permanent opponents? In the nation's toughest conference, that's a natural question for fans to start asking with this shift to a new scheduling philosophy.
There's been a sense that certain teams got way too easy of a draw, despite the SEC's claims about competitive balance. Of course, you can't have anything be perfectly competitive, so there will be some inequality somewhere— but it's also clear that some are more unequal than others.
There's some common-sense wisdom that fans have in just looking at the logos paired up with each team and trusting their guts on which slate looks the easiest. But gut instincts can also mislead just as often as they can inform— so we should take a look at the data.
The numbers tell a pretty definite story about who got an easy draw here and whose lot was particularly misfortunate. In this article, we'll count down those draws from easiest to hardest. I'll talk some about how I calculated these below, but if you want to get right into the ranking, you can click to the next slide.
How schedule difficulty is measured for SEC permanent opponents
But first, a word about method. I consulted three different statistical profiles (Brian Fremeau's FEI ratings, Bill Connelly's SP+ ratings, and Parker Fleming's CFB-Graphs ratings) to get a three-year average of team strength.
When averaging team strength over three years, I counted the more recent years as more valuable than those further back: 2023 impacts the rating less than 2024, and 2022 even less so. This is due to the fact that, obviously, teams are more likely to resemble what they were in recent years than they are to resemble who they were further back.
I then converted these ratings to z-scores to standardize the data, since the output for each of these rating systems is different. Since we're only talking about the SEC, I used the conference itself as the sample size rather than the entire FBS.
Then, I simply averaged each program's three z-scores to build a "difficulty profile" for each team, and from there, it was a matter of averaging out the difficulty profiles for a given team's three permanent opponents. Is it a perfect method? No— but it's still pretty informative for broad-strokes purposes.
That's enough about all the numbers and nerd stuff. Let's dive into who got a gift from Greg Sankey, and who might be sending him some not-so-nice letters very soon.