Every Team's Last Good SEC Road Win

I looked up when Arkansas's last SEC road win over a team that finished over .500 in league play for Monday's intro post, and seeing that it was all the way back in 2010 got me curious. I decided to look up the same piece of information for the rest of the conference's teams.

Getting a true road win—no neutral site games, and not counting the SEC title game—over one of the conference's better teams is even harder than it sounds. For one thing, teams get at most four road games a year. Florida and Georgia only get three every other year thanks to the Cocktail Party being in Jacksonville, and the same is true for Arkansas and Texas A&M for as long as they're going to be playing in JerryWorld.

After that, it's up to the luck of the scheduling draw whether a team that eventually finishes above .500 will even appear on a team's road slate. Only five SEC teams finished above .500 in conference play last year. Last year, South Carolina's conference road games were Vanderbilt, Kentucky, Auburn, and Florida. None of them finished better than 4-4. That's an extreme example, but only getting one such opponent is not uncommon.

Then there's the matter of a team finishing above .500 in conference play not being able to have more than three conference losses. Beating a team on the road means you've just blown a third of its possible loss budget if it's going to finish 5-3 or better. And of course, a team that finished above .500 in conference play is probably a good team, and good teams tend to play well at home.

So with all of that said, here are all of the most recent road wins over teams that finished above .500 in league play:

As you can see, only a couple of these happen per year, although there was a rash of them in 2012. If I wasn't discounting neutral site games, then Florida's most recent one would have been its still puzzling win over Georgia from last fall.

Arkansas is lagging a bit with its last big road win coming in 2010, but it's not in the worst shape. I was expecting Vandy and Kentucky, and to a lesser extent the Mississippi schools, to be down there, but I wasn't thinking Tennessee would be. I was sure the Vols got somebody good in the past ten years, but I guess Terrence Cody made sure that wasn't the case. UT should have at least one opportunity this fall with its Alabama game coming on the road, and visiting Missouri and Florida might provide other opportunities depending on which end of the potential spectrum those teams land.