SEC Inter-Divisional Play: Perfect and Winless Records

by Year2 on Aug 19, 2010 11:00 AM EDT in SEC Football

To wrap this series up, let's take a look at the seasons with goose eggs. That's both in the loss column and in the win column.

PERFECT RECORDS

Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee lead in this category by having five perfect seasons apiece. Florida and Auburn aren't too far behind. Only South Carolina and Vanderbilt have not gone a perfect 3-0 versus the opposite division.

Now for this purpose, I was only looking for perfect 3-0 records. If you're simply worried about records with no losses, then add one to the counts for Alabama, Auburn, and Tennessee as each had a 2-0-1 season before ties were put to rest by the NCAA for the 1996 season.

Now on to winless seasons. In the following graph, each dashed line represents a unit of three instead of one. You'll see why.

WINLESS RECORDS

Poor Vanderbilt.

Only Alabama and Florida have avoided being shut out by the opposite division, and Auburn, Ole Miss, and Tennessee are right there behind them. In fact, Tennessee picked up its first winless season against the SEC West just last year. It's another little present that Lane Kiffin left behind in Knoxville. As for Arkansas, I still don't know if I can fully explain its troubles against the East.

Again, for this one I was only looking for 0-3 records. If you're being pedantic, add another one for LSU as the Tigers went 0-2-1 in 1995.

Overall, there have been 38 winless inter-division records compared to only 30 perfect inter-division records. Given how tough the conference is, I can't say that's a big surprise.

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The inter-division rotation always seems to get us...

Arkansas has played Florida a total of 6 times during the regular season. The Hogs ended those seasons with a winning record only twice (2003 and 2009), and in none of those seasons did the Hogs have a winning record in the SEC. Interestingly, in 2003 and 2009 seasons, the combined point differential is 8 points, versus what seems to be an eleventy billion point differential for the other seasons. Same goes for Georgia. While 3 of the Hog teams the ’Dawgs faced ended with winning records (and another ended 6-6), the only time we won (1993) coincided with our only winning SEC record during a season when we played Georiga.
I have no idea how to explain our 2-4 record against Kentucky.

by dxf04 on Aug 19, 2010 11:48 AM EDT reply actions

Plus Tennessee used to be a permanent opponent and we played Vanderbilt only 4 times since we joined the conference. When anyone was good they rotated on, and when they were bad they rotated off.

by Porcine on Aug 19, 2010 11:20 PM EDT up reply actions