Preseason SEC Power Ranking
Derick E. Hingle-USA TODAY Sports
It’s the week you all have been waiting for since Mississippi State ran roughshod over the Rice owls in the Liberty Bowl last year, game week. Each Monday at 3:00 pm, I will rank the SEC schools from top to bottom while providing a short snippet of how they fared or why they moved up or down. Here is where I will start the schools as we enter the 2014 season. This is based primarily off of the way we predicted the schools will finish in 2014. I will rank them on the following criteria: win or lose, quality of opponent, performance in game. So without further adieu, here is where each team will start as we enter the 2014 season.
- Alabama Crimson Tide: Alabama just wants to win another national title. Anything less is a disappointment.
- Auburn Tigers: Auburn’s main focus will be to prove that last season wasn’t a fluke, and they weren’t the luckiest team in the country.
- Georgia Bulldogs: The other Bulldogs are loaded. Losing Aaron Murray will hurt, but having Gurley in the backfield will make up for a lot of new quarterback mistakes.
- South Carolina Gamecocks: The Gamecocks have their own plethora of talent, and if Mike Davis can come back strong from his injury, they might end up as the team to beat in the east.
- Mississippi State Bulldogs: We have all talked about how we believe this is the year that the Bulldogs take a significant step forward. If they don’t do it this year, will they ever do it under Dan Mullen?
- LSU Tigers: Can Fournette, a freshman running back, provide enough offense for the Tigers defense to win a bunch of games? That’s the biggest question that LSU needs to answer in a hurry.
- Ole Miss Rebels: Ole Miss has stockpiled a lot of talent in Hugh Freeze’s first two years, but that talent is still very young. That might be the difference between 8 wins for the Rebels and 10 wins.
- Missouri Tigers: No one has talked much about Missouri. They didn’t really talk about them last year, and we all saw how that turned out.
- Florida Gators: The defense is solid. The offense? Eh, not so much.
- Texas A&M Aggies: The offense is solid. The defense? Eh, not so much.
- Tennessee Volunteers: Tennessee hopes to get to a bowl this year. That is how far this program has fallen.
- Arkansas Razorbacks: They will be better, but it will probably only show up on the stat sheet and not wins and losses.
- Kentucky Wildcats: If Mark Stoops can continue to recruit well, they Wildcats will get better. It just won’t be this year.
- Vanderbilt Commodores: The Commodores start at the bottom, but if their new coach is half the coach that I think he is, he might have them competing for a bowl spot when they travel to Starkville in November.
Check back here to see if there is any movement in the rankings next Monday.