With their eight-game scheduling format, not all slates are created equal in the SEC. That makes some easier than others, although Greg McElroy would use the word manageable instead, within the Southeastern Conference. McElroy looked at some hardest and easiest schedules in the country last week during ‘Always College Football’. However, when it came time […]
With their eight-game scheduling format, not all slates are created equal in the SEC. That makes some easier than others, although Greg McElroy would use the word manageable instead, within the Southeastern Conference.
McElroy looked at some hardest and easiest schedules in the country last week during ‘Always College Football’. However, when it came time for the easier ones, McElroy made sure to note that, while simpler than others, these schedules were still just as difficult nationally.
“We’ll go next to the most manageable schedules, okay,” said McElroy. “These are not easy, okay. They’re just a little bit more manageable than the schedules I just went through a second ago when going through some of the toughest ones in the country this season.”
However, in the SEC, just one program came up for McElroy as far as those “manageable” schedules – Missouri. That’s with the Tigers opening with six straight games in CoMo, not going on the road until the second half of the season starts in mid-October, and the entire slate featuring almost all of the conference’s worst teams from a year ago yet just four of the ten teams from the league who’ll enter this year in the Preseason AP Top-25. That’s quite the path for a team, one that has won 11 and 10 games respectively in each of the past two years, that could post double-digit victories in trying to make a case for the CFP.
“The most manageable is Mizzou, okay. Mizzou actually has a chance to be very, very sneaky this season,” said McElroy. “They start? Their first six games are all at home. Pretty good place to start, so you get to kind of work in some new pieces right in the friendly confines there in Columbia, Missouri. There were six teams in the SEC last year that had losing records in conference. Five of those six are on Missouri’s schedule.”
“They’ll get the rivalry game againstKansas there the second week of the season. They’ll get South Carolina and Alabama at home. That’s big. If you knock off one of those two teams, now we’re talking about the possibility of a playoff berth for the Missouri Tigers,” McElroy continued. “They’ll go to Auburn, they’ll go to Vandy – both those games, I think, will be very difficult – before getting A&M at home, Mississippi State at home – who’s probably the worst team in the SEC, before going on the road in their final two games at Oklahoma and at Arkansas.”
Mizzou would be the first to tell you that this slate isn’t easy, with games, based on the schedule flipping, against all three teams who beat them a season ago. Still, some other teams around the SEC, considering what they’ll be dealing with this year, might likely trade if they could have the Tigers’ schedule instead.
“It’s not easy, but it is more manageable than the likes of theFloridaschedules, theOklahomaschedules, and theArkansasschedules that we talked about already,” said McElroy.
Category: General Sports
