SEC Football news: Newcomer teams gifted easiest, hardest schedules in the league

SEC football news: Red River rivals given extremely disparate qualities of conference schedule in year one

With still somehow months to go before SEC football arrives, fans are facing down a summer of analysis, re-analysis, analysis of things you didn't know you could analyze, and recruiting news. In the vein of at least one of those categories, check this out!

Parker Fleming (@statsowar on X) is a great follow for those inclined to statistical analysis of college football. He's up there with the very best when it comes to breaking down games, upcoming matchups, team quality, and much more.

Fleming recently tweeted out a very interesting statistic that he pulled together, ranking the SEC teams' schedule by strength based on the average Vegas win total projection of conference opponents. This basically ranks how difficult a team's conference slate is projected to be.

Surprisingly (at least in one case), the new additions to the conference come in at the very top and the very bottom of these rankings. Oklahoma's conference slate is the toughest, with their SEC opponents projected to have, on average, 8.88 wins. Texas is at rock bottom, with their SEC opponents projected to have, on average, 6.25 wins.

It's been evident that the Longhorns have a cakewalk of a schedule this year (and, for that matter, next year—as things currently stand, teams are set to repeat their same opponents in conference in 2025, only switching venues). I did not expect, however, to see Oklahoma at the top of this ranking.

Some Longhorn fans may object here, saying that this something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: since Texas is projected in Vegas to have a high number of wins, then all of their opponents are likely to have fewer wins than they would otherwise by virtue of the fact that they have to play Texas. This makes sense on one level, but it affects the numbers to a lesser degree than one might expect: Alabama and Georgia, for example, both rank in the top half of schedule difficulty by this metric.

It is remarkable that the slate the SEC has given OU has them facing, on average, a team battling for ten wins, and the slate that the conference has bestowed upon Texas has them facing, on average, a team battling for bowl eligibility. Mind you, this is including the fact that the Longhorns will play Georgia and Texas A&M football this year!

As for the Aggies, they are in the third quartile here, coming in with the 11th-most-difficult schedule out of 16 by this metric. Their average conference opponent is projected to just over seven wins, at 7.12.

These projections could all end up being patently inaccurate, of course. But as things stand, this is quite the disparity for these two rivals.