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The SEC East is going to be pretty fascinating in 2017. Last year’s two best teams, Florida and Tennessee, have quite a bit to replace, while the other five teams in the division — Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina, and Vanderbilt — all return a ton of last year’s production.
If you look at last year’s S&P+ rankings, these returning production figures create a situation in which virtually everyone enters the season thinking they have a chance at the division title. Florida (15th in S&P+) and Tennessee (28th) won’t fall that far, and Kentucky (67th), Georgia (68th), Missouri (69th), Vanderbilt (71st), and South Carolina (79th) could all improve by a decent amount. In theory, that could create quite the exciting logjam.
Not so, says the conventional wisdom.
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According to 243 media members, Mizzou, which beat Vanderbilt, nearly beat Georgia, and outgained both South Carolina and Tennessee in road losses, is a distant last.
Breaking the points into a per-voter average (with 7 points being a first-place vote and 1 being a last-place vote), we see just how distant Mizzou’s deficit is.
- Georgia 6.4
- Florida 6.3
- Tennessee 4.1
- South Carolina 3.7
- Kentucky 3.6
- Vanderbilt 2.2
- Missouri 1.6
Conventional wisdom is an ass sometimes. But it certainly helps to provide some extra motivation.