SEC Historical Football Series Mapped Out

What you're about to see is a small piece of a much larger project I'm working on. This part is about the historical series that teams have with each other.

What qualifies as a historical series obviously is a subjective matter, so feel free to disagree. What I ended up using as a rubric is that a matchup that has occurred in at least half of a pair of team's all-time games counts as "historic". I figure that if something has happened on average at least one out of every two seasons across a program's entire existence, it probably counts.

I stopped counting at the 2010 season because the thing I'm working on relates to the recent round of realignment that's been going on. Because of that cut off point, Texas A&M and Missouri don't qualify as SEC teams for these purposes. Sorry, guys. The data I got comes from James Howell's database, as queried by Chris Stassen's site. Both are tremendous resources for college football history.

So here's the map of SEC historical series. The thickness of the lines corresponds to how many games have happened during the series. A thicker line means more games.

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As you can see, some schools have more historical series within the conference than others do. Arkansas and South Carolina have a good excuse for their low numbers, but then Tennessee and Auburn only have four apiece. Scheduling within the conference was not terribly standardized prior to the 1992 expansion, to say nothing of the olden days of the SIAA and gigantic Southern Conference, so the game counts can vary quite a bit among the teams.

Here are the historical SEC series counts for each team:

I qualified that as "SEC historical series", because some schools have historical series outside the conference. Like, for instance, my alma mater does:

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So does Ole Miss:

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That's all I have for now; I've got a long way to go on this. I just wanted to share this much with y'all in case you find it interesting.