The 2018 college football season for the Southeastern Conference is about to begin. Here is a look at our inaugural SEC Power Rankings ahead of Week 1.
College football is set to begin for the nation’s premiere conference. Our preseason SEC Power Rankings comes the season after seeing two SEC teams play for the national championship for the second time this decade.
Simply put, there’s no question that this remains the dominant league in the country. And once again, with three teams in the preseason Top 10, expectations are wild. However, they’re a bit different this year.
Numerous teams enter new eras with new head coaches or have to replace a lot of talent. In fact, there’s only one team that you can be sure will be on the same level it was at towards the end of last season.
As we get set to bring you our SEC Power Rankings ahead of the season, every other team is up for debate. However, it’s worth noting the criteria for these rankings. During the season, they’ll be based on how each team is playing at that time.
Like always, projections have nothing to do with these rankings. The same holds true for now in the preseason. We will not base these on how good we expect the teams to be at all. They are only based on how they played most recently, which is at the end of last year, and then anything in the offseason that would’ve reduced the quality of their play.
It’s worth noting that a coaching change is something that would reduce the quality of play, along with any serious offseason drama. But a change in personnel is not so much part of this. It’s not the job of these rankings to project such personnel.
Simply put, we are only going off what we know based on what we’ve seem with this list. And there’s a strong chance it changes dramatically after the first week of the season, as starting next week, we won’t base anything on what happened last year. But until then, these are our preseason SEC Power Rankings for 2018.