The 2025 season was the second year for TideFans.com’s ever-evolving coverage of all 16 SEC teams and a discussion of team strengths and weaknesses in our 2025 Rating the Units analysis. It was difficult to say goodbye to some old habits – two divisional races leading up to a winner-takes-all SEC Championship Game, for instance – but time marches on.
Heading into 2026, we’re beginning to get our feet under us again, as last season was so different from previous years as to be a completely different kind of analytical experience. Ranking all 16 conference teams against each other proved to be a difficult task. The format continues this year: 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.
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For the third season now, we will 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 uses three methods of placing teams in the preseason: simple won-loss record, Tier Rankings, and our Rating The Units (RTU) feature, the latter solely dealing with how each of the 16 teams compare to one another unit-by-unit.
First, here is our preseason prediction for the 2026 SEC season:
Fans may or may not be surprised by some of these listings; we went out on a limb to a greater extent, both in the positive and the negative, than we usually do, owing to the more liquid nature of SEC rosters in the transfer portal era. Can Georgia actually go undefeated? Can Tennessee win nine games despite a total mystery at the quarterback position? Will Texas A&M really fall back to mid-pack status? Will Vanderbilt and Kentucky – especially Kentucky – fall back to more familiar territory at the back of the conference pack?
Tennessee is the biggest overachiever here, although some might argue that title belongs to Alabama. Like Tennessee, the Crimson Tide will have a new starter under center, but we like the quarterback room in Tuscaloosa far better than the one in Knoxville. We also like Missouri as a potential darkhorse, and we have LSU placed slightly higher than do a lot of pundits, owing to the trust we have in Lane Kiffin to deliver better-than-expected results in his first year in Baton Rouge.
On the flip side, Florida fans have to be questioning exactly when the Gators are going to return to prominence. We don’t think it’s 2026; in addition to a coaching regime change, there is no proven commodity at quarterback and the Gator offensive line frankly scares us. We’re also not a believer in recent upward trends in Starkville – there’s yet another team on the list with offensive line problems – and we have Arkansas finishing with double-digit losses for the second year in a row.
At the top, we feel there is actually significant separation between Georgia and anyone else, and we think there’s a noticeable gap from Texas down to whichever team out of a list of 4-5 candidates is going to finish in third place. On our second year into college football’s modern era, a 10-2 record with a pair of conference losses feels like what we will dub the “contender line.”
Now that we’ve talked about our purely subjective ratings, let’s move on to the 2026 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, Ole Miss lands in Tier I and LSU in Tier II, but we’re going to call your attention to Tier III, and specifically Auburn. This is what we’ll call “foreshadowing” for now, pending a discussion of personnel strength in the Rating The Units second.
By and large, most teams line up with their predicted finish in the subjective reviews, and while we see plenty of chances for mobility up and down between the first three tiers, we feel Tier IV is fairly locked into place, with Florida really the only team inside Tiers I-III having the chance to completely crash and burn.
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 16th 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 we get to do the fun stuff, which is parse data and have a discussion of subjective versus a more objective set of numbers. At the top, there’s no surprise to see Georgia leading, and while we strongly believe Texas is a better program overall than Ole Miss, we can certainly see the Rebels having a path to elevate into second place.
But then you hit the fourth and fifth positions on the rankings and … oh, my.
There’s Auburn sitting in fifth place, just one point behind Alabama, and ahead of LSU, Tennessee, Oklahoma and others that we ranked above the Tigers in both the above lists. How is this possible?
The Rating the Units feature takes a look at pure roster strength. Auburn was judged to have had a solid portal haul, filled the most necessary gaps in the lineup, and bolster the parts of the team that were already strong. Do we believe Auburn is the 5th-best team in the SEC? Not even close, and because of the change in coaches and some real questions at offensive line, we think seven wins, which is what we projected for the Tigers, is the ceiling. But that’s not what the RTU score says.
The next surprise to discuss is Tennessee landing in 10th. Unlike Auburn in 5th place, we can easily see the Volunteers falling short of our lofty expectations. We think head coach Josh Heupel may be coaching for his job, and the Tennessee quarterback situation isn’t the best. Our pick of 9-3 for the Vols assumes everything goes right in the schedule, and everything rarely goes right.
Other minor surprises include Texas A&M’s place in our subjective rankings being confirmed by the RTU score, Florida ranking 8th (which would put the Gators at the bottom of Tier II, if one were to superimpose these ratings onto the tier list) and Arkansas coming in ahead of Mississippi State at the very bottom.
2025: A Review
So how did TideFans.com fare in its predictions last year?
In the narrative section, TideFans.com was surprisingly accurate. We correctly identified Ole Miss as a playoff team, were fairly spot-on about Texas A&M’s chances, nailed South Carolina, Kentucky and Missouri, and had Florida mostly pegged. But we missed badly on Vanderbilt, predicting the Commodores to fall back to 5-7, and also missed on Oklahoma, also picking the Sooners to have a 5-7 record. We also had Texas ahead of Georgia at the top of the conference rankings, which obviously did not pan out.
For the most part, we ended up getting the top half of the conference sorted well enough, with most of the inaccuracies coming at the back end. If we’re going to miss, that’s how we want to miss, because we’ve found ourselves picking teams to finish with 10 wins before, only to see them limp home with three or four wins and a coaching change.
As for what we got right that few others did, South Carolina was probably our smartest pick. Somehow over the summer, the Gamecocks began attracting a lot of interest as a surprise pick for the College Football Playoff. We never really bought into that. And to be honest, probably our second-biggest “hit” was not to undersell Alabama, as many doomsayers were trying to do.
As for the more objective RTU method, it was arguably less accurate. It badly oversold the Florida program, placing the Gators 4th with a score of 86, and undersold Ole Miss, bringing the Rebels home in 6th with a score of 81. RTU did a slightly better job evaluating Oklahoma – the Sooners were tied for 7th with a respectable score of 72 – but missed badly on Texas A&M (68, 10th place) and Vanderbilt (44, 13th place).
That means, for the third straight year, our subjective analysis has beaten the numbers at their own game. The major reason for this, as we stated last year, is that when rosters turn over so frequently as they do nowadays, and so completely when they do turn over, it’s hard to judge just how good the new additions really are, especially those that arrive from smaller schools. For that reason, we’ll be keeping a cautious eye on what the RTU thinks of Auburn.
As always, take this research for what it really is – entertainment.
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Follow Jess Nicholas on X at @TideFansJessN
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