It won't be surprising to this board that the following statement appeared in an ESPN article on the CFP "Anger Index"
Eleven weeks into the 2024 season, and one thing seems abundantly clear: The SEC is the best conference in college football.
The only thing about the SEC that seems "abundantly clear" to me is that there is no dominant team in the SEC this year. The question then becomes is it because they are all so great, or maybe it is a down year at the top of the conference. The usual way to try to answer this question is to look at the out-of-conference schedule, and there are some interesting results.
Let's Start with the latest darling and slayer of Big Bad Georgia, Ole Miss. In the wake of their win over UGA it is easy to forget that they lost to UK and LSU, two teams with 9losses between them. So maybe it is that big OOC game they won that is padding their resume. Let's look. When people talk about "not playing anyone" this is what they have to mean. Ole Miss has an OOC schedule of Furman, MTSU, Georgia Southern, and Wake Forest. There is absolutely nothing that can be gained from looking at their record in those games, so let's move on.
The Vols don't have quite as an embarrassing schedule having played against Chattanooga, Kent State, and NC State . . . or maybe the do. They also managed to lose to Arkansas. So, what about the other top SEC teams?
UGA started the season with a dominant win over Clemson, but this just isn't the kind of win that it was just a few years ago, and they've looked overmatched against both Ole Miss (who we know we know nothing about) and Alabama. Alabama whipped Wisconsin in convincing fashion, 42-10, which is exactly the same score that Iowa logged against Wisconsin. It is also hard to overlook Bama's loss to Vandy which (and I cannot resist a little transitive property here) actually lost at football to Georgia . . . State! Texas looked out of their depth against UGA but whipped Michigan which looked good at the time, but since then we can say that so did Oregon, and Illinois, and Indiana, and Washington. Finally there is LSU who I think we can finally stop thinking of as good at football, but it is still worth noting that they did manage both to beat Ole Miss and lose to a USC team that is now 2-5 in the B1G.
The typical explanation for this in the SEC is that they "beat up on each other" which maybe true, but in the absence of evidence of them beating up on anybody decent outside the conference, it is hard to buy the same old story. So, are the CFP rankings actually accurate, and the best two teams in CFP are in the BIG this season?
