SEC Brag-O-Meter: Football Over The 2000s

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There’s nothing more important in sports than bragging rights.  Forget sportsmanship and good effort.  That’s what we try to sell Little Leaguers.  SEC sports is all about rubbing the other guy’s nose in it and you know it.

Last week, here at MrSEC.com we created a formula to show you exactly which SEC athletic department earned the most bragging rights in 2010-11 in football and in men’s basketball.  By the numbers, Auburn fans — with their school’s BCS title in football — had the most to boast about in the past year.  You can see the full results right here, from first (Auburn) to last (Vanderbilt).

The response to our formula was so good that we’ve decided to take an expanded look at the SEC’s programs over the greater part of the new millenium.  In this post, we’ll focus on the league’s football programs over two four-year periods — 2003-2006 and 2007-2010.

Our first action was to tweak the formula we used in the previous post.  The goal was to create point values for every single thing that fans most often brag about.  That point scale is as follows:


Wins = 1 point each (We found over time that SEC schools average about 2.5 wins in basketball for every win in football, so we multiplied the football victories by 2.5… meaning football wins and basketball wins will be equally weighted when we combine the two in later comparisons.)
Bowl Bids = 1 point
BCS Bowl Bids = 1 point
National Titles = 5 points (We assigned a big bonus for a national crown.)
Heisman Trophies = 1 point
SEC Titles = 2 points (We assigned extra weight to a league title.)
SEC Division Titles = 1 point
Top 10 Recruiting Classes = 1 point (Rivals’ rankings were used.)


Using the above formula, each school’s individual points were as follows:

Assuming we’ve copied the info from our thrice-checked Excel sheet correctly, we can now show you which programs have given their fans the most to brag about and celebrate from 2003 until now.  Let’s start with a look at the past eight seasons, 2003-2010:

While most would probably assume — I know I did — that Florida had had the best run over the past eight years, the numbers tell us LSU’s football success over that span was actually greater.  The difference between the two schools?  Ron Zook.  The Tigers simply recorded more wins than the Gators.

Now let’s break those numbers down by four-year periods, first from 2007-2010 and then — for comparison — from 2003-2006:

Interestingly, you’ll note that the numbers prove that the SEC has gotten tougher and more balanced over the past four seasons.  From 2003 to 2006, six league schools (Alabama, South Carolina, Ole Miss, Kentucky, Vanderbilt and Mississippi State) all earned fewer than 70 “bragging points.”  But from 2007 through 2010 only three schools (Mississippi State, Ole Miss and Vandy) earned less than 70 points and all of those schools tallied more than 41.  Both Vandy and MSU were well below that total in the 2003-06 span.

It doesn’t just seem like the SEC is more competitive, it really is.  The worst teams aren’t as bad today as they were eight years ago.

So which programs improved — or regressed — the most from one four-year period to the next?

Clearly, the quartet of Auburn, LSU, Tennessee and Georgia had farther to fall than most other schools.  Three of those four earned 100+ bragging points from 2003 to 2006 and UT tallied more than 90. 

Auburn, LSU and Georgia all still ranked in the top five of the 2007-10 span earning more than 95.5 points a piece.  Only Tennessee truly nosedived from fifth in the league to eighth.

It could also be argued that Mississippi State and Kentucky had nowhere to go but up, but that wouldn’t fairly measure just how much those programs improved from 2003-06 to 2007-10.  Both earned more than 30 “bragging points” more in the most recent span than they did in the previous one.  Kudos to the leadership at both schools.

But the biggest jump can be attributed to the Saban Factor.  Nick Saban’s arrival at Alabama led to a 58.5 “bragging point” bounce for the Crimson Tide.  No other school showed anywhere near that much progress from 03-06 to 07-10.  That number is truly remarkable.


Soon we’ll take a look at which schools’ fans have the most reasons to brag due to basketball results over the last eight years.  And then we’ll wrap things up by adding football accomplishments with those in hoops to get a glimpse of which SEC athletic departments are moving in the right direction… and which ones are moving in the wrong direction when it comes to the league’s money sports.