OPINION: How South Carolina's 2024 SEC Schedule Stacks Up Against Rest Of The League

South Carolina's Football team has a somewhat favorable SEC schedule in 2024 when it comes to overall schedule difficulty.

Author:
Andrew Lyon
Publish date:
Jun 16, 2023 1:34 PM EDT

The SEC released the 2024 conference schedules for each of its fourteen member institutions, along with Oklahoma and Texas, on Wednesday evening. Since this television extravaganza, there's been a lot of debating between both analysts and fans alike regarding which teams have the toughest and easiest SEC schedules in 2024.

One thing that's helped everyone understand how the conference determined the opponents for each team is the Group A/Group B table that the SEC front office divided all of the teams into, which looked specifically at the conference record for each team over the past ten seasons.

Based on how the schedules were constructed, each team will face four Group A and four Group B teams, with two games on either side on the road and vice versa. For South Carolina, this is what the SEC came up with:

Group A

Alabama (Away)

Oklahoma (Away)

LSU (Home)

Texas A&M (Home)

Group B

Missouri (Home)

Ole Miss (Home)

Kentucky (Away)

Vanderbilt (Away)

On the surface, this schedule may seem daunting to Gamecock fans due to the fact that road trips to Tuscaloosa and Norman are included in their SEC slate, plus a home against the LSU Tigers, who look to be either the second or third-best team currently in the conference. However, when compiling the overall win percentages and conference win percentages for each of these teams over the past two seasons, which I did to account for all the coaching changes these programs have endured, here's how the numbers shake out in terms of schedule difficulty:

*2024 Opponents Overall Win % Over Last 2 Seasons | 2024 Opponents Overall Conference Win % Over Last 2 Seasons*

Florida: 65.5% | 57.8%

Auburn: 62.7% | 53%

Tennessee: 63.8% | 51.8%

Mississippi State: 61.5% | 52.4%

Georgia: 61.6% | 51.8%

Oklahoma: 60.3% | 52.6%

Vanderbilt: 59.8% | 51.1%

Ole Miss: 64.1% | 47.2%

Alabama: 58.3% | 49%

--> South Carolina: 58.9% | 48.6%

Kentucky: 57.9% | 48.5%

Arkansas: 56.5% | 48.4%

Texas: 59.6% | 46.8%

LSU: 58.3% | 45.5%

Texas A&M: 53.5% | 42.9%

Missouri: 57% | 38.5%

While my list in terms of the rankings is entirely subjective, I believe that the Gamecocks rank 10th in the SEC in terms of schedule difficulty in 2024, despite having teams like Alabama, LSU, and Oklahoma on the schedule.

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