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1) We are less than a month away from the unofficial start of another SEC football season. SEC Media Days in Nashville starts July 17. It reinforces how truly year-round college sports now are because the College World Series is still ongoing. There's less than four weeks of actual off time in the college sports calendar. That said, it's been a quiet offseason for Missouri. The loss to Princeton feels like it was six months ago to me. In your world, that's probably a bad thing. I would imagine most people on this site think there has been very little news and are starving to get back to the point where there's something new happening every day. In my world, it's pretty good. And truthfully, it's good for Mizzou too. Most things that happen in the months of May and June in college football and basketball aren't all that good. You want your team out of the headlines in those months.
2) Eli Drinkwitz added a quarterback to his 2024 class when Aidan Glover committed last week. Glover replaced Daniel Kaelin, who was committed to Mizzou for a few weeks before flipping to Nebraska. It's important to get a QB in every class, especially in the transfer world. I'd argue no position has been impacted more in all of college sports than quarterback. It's really the only position where only one person plays. In every other sport and even at every other position in football, the starter takes some time off. Even if you're a backup, you're getting on the field. At quarterback, the best kind of backup quarterback is the one that never takes the field in a meaningful situation. But what that means is that 3/4 of the players at the position rarely see the field and 1/2 of them pretty much never do. And players that aren't seeing the field leave.
Missouri has four scholarship quarterbacks on the roster right now. If everyone stays (FYI, everyone won't), the Tigers would have five on the roster next year, one in every class. Brady Cook has eligibility through the 2024 season, Jake Garcia 2025, Sam Horn 2026, Gabarri Johnson 2027 and Glover 2028. That's the balance and numbers you need. Because after this season, at least one of those first three almost certainly won't be on Missouri's roster anymore. Maybe two.
3) The biggest sign yet that the SEC is a light version of the NFL came last Wednesday. The league released its 2024 conference schedule in a one-hour primetime show on SEC Network. It actually wasn't even a schedule. It was just a list of opponents and locations. For a season that doesn't start for 15 months. And it dominated the college sports news cycle for the next 24 hours. It's impressive in a way.
As far as the actual schedules go, the league did a pretty good job of balancing things out. They split the schools into Tier A and Tier B schools. They made that determination based on conference records over the last ten seasons. Every team plays four teams from each tier, two home and two away. It's not perfect because, for example. that model has Florida rated significantly higher than Tennessee. Tennessee's a better team and a better program right now. But no system is going to be perfect. All told, the league did about as good a job as possible of creating a fairly balanced scheduling model in a 16-team league.
4) Here is how the tiers broke down, with each team's league record over the last decade:
TIER A
Alabama: 73-9
Georgia: 64-17
Oklahoma: 69-20
LSU: 52-30
Florida: 47-35
Texas: 50-39
Auburn: 44-38
Texas A&M: 42-39
TIER B
Mizzou: 39-43
Mississippi State: 38-44
Ole Miss: 36-45
South Carolina: 34-48
Tennessee: 34-48
Kentucky: 32-50
Arkansas: 21-61
Vanderbilt 16-65
My initial impressions were that Mizzou ranked higher than I probably would have thought, Kentucky ranked quite a bit lower than I would have thought. It also shows that there are four teams who have been a cut above everyone else. Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma and LSU are the only teams to average a league record more than 1.2 games above .500 per season in the last ten year. Everyone from Florida to Ole Miss is between 1.2 games over .500 and a game under .500. South Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky are a little behind that group, but not devastatingly so. Arkansas and Vandy are clearly 15 and 16 over the last decade.
5) What if the time frame had been just five years? That's probably a little more accurate judge of where the programs are right now. That's not arguing with using the record over a decade. I think that was perfectly fine. But looking at five years will give us an idea of who has gotten better in the last half decade and who has gotten worse. Here are the league records over the last five seasons:
TIER A
Georgia: 37-4
Alabama: 37-5
Oklahoma: 32-12
LSU: 27-15
Texas: 26–18
Florida: 24-18
Texas A&M: 23-18
Tennessee: 20-22
Kentucky: 20-22
TIER B
Auburn: 19-23
Mizzou: 18-24
Mississippi State: 18-24
Ole Miss: 17-24
South Carolina: 16-27
Arkansas: 10-32
Vanderbilt 6-35
I was surprised to see it changes almost nothing. Tennessee and Kentucky would have jumped up into a tie for the final Tier A spot (8th overall). Auburn would have dropped from the bottom of Tier A to the top of Tier B. Nobody else would have moved tiers. Even the order would barely have changed. Texas would have been a little better, South Carolina and Mizzou a little worse, but that's it.
