Rating the Units: A tale of two divisions

Part of TideFans.com’s annual previews tradition is taking a look at how each team’s respective positional units are thought of prior to the season, then coming back after the year is over and seeing just how accurately – or inaccurately – our preseason looks were.

We are never beholden to a specific set of criteria when picking eventual division or conference champions in our longer-form narrative articles. This year, for that matter, Mississippi State is very well thought-of in regard to unit quality, but TideFans/NARCAS has the Bulldogs finishing with a losing record, the result of unexpected (and tragic) coaching turnover and a wholesale change in offensive system, the latter of which consistently makes it hard to win in such a competitive conference. But our unit rating matrix is a bit more scientific, and attempts to cut out some of those biases, replacing Nostradamus with mathematics, at least to some degree.

Last year, our matrix evaluations of the SEC East were reasonably spot-on. Aside from a mild overrating of the Missouri program, we had no qualms about where we positioned each team in the eastern division.

The SEC West was another matter entirely. LSU not only was picked to finish 6th, it scored just 24 overall points in the intra-divisional rankings, which meant we completely missed the boat on the Tigers, who eventually wound up in Atlanta. The tracking errors didn’t stop there; Ole Miss ranked 7th in the West with 21 overall points, Texas A&M ranked second, Auburn was ranked in the middle of the pack and Alabama’s ranking of first might not have been far off in the long run, but accumulating 52 points against its divisional peers was probably a bit of overkill.

This year, as always, we start with a ranking of each school in their respective division against the other schools. Here is that table:

The SEC looks pretty believable on its face, with the noted exception of Kentucky being ranked sixth with 27 points. Missouri again gets a lot of love from our objective rankings, coming in third with 33 points ahead of South Carolina, Florida and the Wildcats. Unsurprisingly, Georgia is the top point-getter at 49, and no team from either division cracks the 50-point mark.

The SEC West, though, is a bit of an enigma. We have LSU winning the division in our subjective rankings, but when the comparison goes to the unit comparisons, Alabama leads the division and it’s not particularly close. As we mentioned at the top of the article, Mississippi State enjoys a strong showing with 35 points in third place, but whether the Bulldogs can take advantage of that talent remains to be seen. Our system also isn’t a believer in either Ole Miss or Arkansas, a pair of media darlings due to Lane Kiffin and K.J. Jefferson, respectively.

Now, we combine the two divisions and judge the 14 teams against each other, irrespective of geography:

Alabama set a record last year as supposedly the best team we’d ever evaluated in this manner, cracking the 100-point mark and setting a record for team score in the 14-team era. This year, consider our roll to have been slowed. Georgia is the pacesetter, putting up 93 points to lead the SEC as a whole, but Alabama still holds a sizable 89-to-76 lead over third-place LSU, the team we picked in our narrative to win the SEC West.

For that matter, the gap between LSU and Mississippi State is closer than the gap from LSU up to Alabama, and in our narrative, we have the Bulldogs going 4-8. That’s a huge spread and something is going to have to give, one way or another – or maybe, meet in the middle.

Tennessee landing in a tie for 6th with Missouri is also suspect. Our matrix undervalued the Volunteers last year, too, and overvalued Missouri. The two methods seem to track together again more as we reach the bottom of the list, as neither our narrative nor our matrix evaluations think much of Florida or Vanderbilt. The matrix is much more pessimistic about Auburn’s chances, as in our narrative, we have the Tigers making a bowl.

As always, take this research for what it really is – entertainment.

Follow Jess Nicholas on X at @TideFansJessN