2025 SEC Preview: Rating The Units

2025 Rating The Units: Keeping Up With The Changes in the SEC

The 2024 season served as the rollout for TideFans.com’s new version of our popular annual feature, Rating The Units. As the SEC dropped the two-division model for a 16-team free-for-all, TideFans was there to change with the times.

Going forward into 2025, we will follow the format introduced a year ago. We will rank each team against the other 15, judging teams on how their eight unit sets – QB, RB, WR and OL on offense; DL, LB, DB and special teams for defense – compare to one another.

For the second year, we also provide our tier list, breaking the conference down into four quadrants. While a conference contender could theoretically emerge from any of the four, our four preview articles were divided based on how we saw the conference breaking down, generally speaking. The tier list did not last year, does not this year, and may never track exactly along with how teams will finish record-wise, given that differing team records may sometimes be the product of unequal schedules.

In the end, TideFans.com now will use three methods of placing teams in the preseason: simple won-loss record, Tier Rankings, and our Rating The Units (RTU) feature, now solely dealing with how each of the 16 teams compare to one another unit-by-unit.

First, here is our preseason prediction for the 2025 SEC season:

We don’t think there are any surprises here outside maybe of our 7-5 prediction for South Carolina, which was a bowl team last season. However, we feel the national media is not giving proper weight to the sheer amount of losses the Gamecocks’ roster sustained following the end of the 2024 season. One thing is assured, though: If South Carolina finds a way to repeat last year’s 9-4 season, it will cause any future analyses of the Gamecocks to take into account a more favorable opinion of Shane Beamer and his staff. Either the 2024 Gamecocks were incredibly lucky, or player development is clearly on track there.

Outside of that, some minor surprises include Missouri falling back to 6-6, Vanderbilt falling to 5-7 (but remember, the Commodores were just 6-6 in the regular season last year) and on the other side of the spectrum, some may be surprised by Auburn’s 7-5 pick.

At the top, most observers agree that the SEC has slight separation between its top three teams (Texas, Alabama and Georgia, order unimportant) and a group of good-but-not-great teams that all have a few exemplary features, but also are fighting to get past shortcomings in other areas of their rosters.

Now that we’ve talked about our purely subjective ratings, let’s move on to the 2025 SEC Tier Ratings:

This is somewhat a combination of our subjective rankings for each team, an analysis of their schedules and a more holistic review of the state of these programs as a whole. As a result, LSU flips with Ole Miss; the Rebels have a more manageable schedule, but LSU has an exceptionally veteran offense, more roster continuity and, we feel, is simply the better team.

After that, most teams line up with their predicted finish in the subjective previews. If you’re looking for a debate topic, though, try this one out: Outside of Ole Miss, which we think is a solid Tier II team at worst, any of the other Tier II teams could switch with any of the Tier III teams. It’s that close in the middle.

And that brings us to our annual Rating The Units feature. Here, we compare each school in the conference to the other 15 by evaluating eight separate team units, scoring them, then giving points in each category. Teams get 16 points for finishing first in a category, 15 points for second, 14 points for third and so on, down to 1 point for a finish of 16^th in a category.

First, here’s how the teams scored, all on one sheet, in alphabetical order (Ex=Excellent, Vg=Very Good; Av=Average, Fr=Fair; Pr=Poor):

And now, here is that same chart, represented numerically, still in alphabetical order:

And finally, here are the teams ranked in order of their unit ratings, from highest-scoring to lowest-scoring:

Now’s where the fun starts – parsing the data. At the top, Texas leads Alabama, but it’s closer than it first looks. The two teams were tied prior to the inclusion of the Special Teams category, which gave Texas the overall lead.

Beyond that, the first surprise team is Florida, which jumps LSU, Ole Miss, Texas A&M and Tennessee from our tier list and goes into the bottom of Tier I. We don’t think that particular scenario is too far out of reach for Florida, but it’s going to depend heavily on the health of QB D.J. Lagway as the season rolls along. The other minor surprise is that there are 10 teams that score well enough to be considered playoff contenders in our eyes – we think the cutoff is somewhere around a score of 65 – and seeing Auburn and Oklahoma tied for 7^th with Tennessee at 72 points is probably enough to raise an eyebrow.

Texas A&M falling to 10^th overall – which would be squarely in the middle of Tier III – at 68 points is a bit of a surprise, but Texas A&M, like Vanderbilt, was a team that seemed to finish better in the eyes of fans than it actually did on paper. In addition, the Aggies weren’t as active or aggressive in the transfer portal as we assumed they’d be. The rest of the list looks pretty accurate to us, beginning with a Missouri team we feel will fall back into a midpack team in 2025, but again, the numerical ranking of the South Carolina Gamecocks looks quite low for a team that went 9-4 last year and returns its starting quarterback.

2024: A Review

So how did TideFans.com fare in its predictions last year?

In the narrative section, we had largely an accurate year at the top of the conference, aside from perhaps overrating Ole Miss by a touch. We took Georgia as our conference champion, defeating the Rebels, while Texas finished tied for third. In the actual SEC Championship Game, the Bulldogs beat Texas, while Ole Miss finished 8^th in the conference, albeit with a regular-season record of 9-3 (versus the 11-1 we predicted).

We were still fairly accurate in regard to the next group of teams, with our biggest misses being South Carolina on the low side and Auburn on the high side. We had Auburn as a 7-win bowl team; the Tigers missed the postseason. However, we took South Carolina to finish 4-8, and that was our biggest miss. Right there with the USC whiff, though, was taking Vanderbilt to finish 3-9 instead of 6-6.

As for what we got right that few others did, Kentucky was probably at the top of that list. The Wildcats were being picked by some as a potential playoff team; we didn’t buy it. We took the Wildcats to finish 6-6 (they did even worse, dropping to 4-8). And we hit Oklahoma on the head at 6-6, correctly foreseeing a rough introductory year into the SEC for the Sooners.

As for the more objective RTU method, it may have been less accurate than our own predictions. Among the mistakes, the RTU oversold Alabama – the Crimson Tide was tied with Georgia at the top of the charts at 108 points – and badly undersold South Carolina and especially Vanderbilt, which finished with a near all-time low of 15 points. However, the RTU was more accurate in its assessment of Ole Miss and Texas A&M.

This is two erratic years in a row for the RTU process, and as we said last year, we’re still in the middle of the new reality of modern roster management, which makes assessing unit strength a lot tougher than it used to be. We have to make the best call we can with what we think will happen, which includes not just trying to analyze hundreds of new SEC, but also figure out how they fit in with their new teams, and how those teams now fit in a college football landscape that is ragged around the edges and largely left to its own devices.

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

Follow Jess Nicholas on X at @TideFansJessN