Readers:
Our 2024 fall previews will be coming out soon, over the next two weeks. The preview for Alabama went up tonight, and follows the typical format that our previews have followed dating back to 1997.
However, with the changes to the format of the SEC, we will have to make a significant change to how we put together our previews, our Rating The Units feature and the way we use the RTU findings to rank the teams. As you know, we no longer have divisions in the SEC, so there is no longer a need to group teams by East or West division. We can still use RTU to get a profile of all 16 teams, but the data that it spits out may not lend itself to the same kind of analysis we've done in the past.
There is also, for this year at least, the problem of how to rate Texas and Oklahoma with neither of them having played in the SEC before. We've fought this issue before -- the addition of Texas A&M and Missouri, for instance -- but not when both additions would have been presumptive contenders in their former conference, and especially, not in the days of unbound transfers and rosters that turn over like the inventory of milk at your local supermarket.
The other question is, absent the presence of divisions, how do we divide teams up to properly preview them? We were already running into issues in the recent past of being able to use our traditional metrics to evaluate teams coming out of spring practice, since offseason moves rendered a lot of those evaluations almost moot. We have shifted to a mid/late fall evaluation schedule, but that impacts the length and depth of what we can produce editorially in time for the season to start.
Thus, we're going to divide the 2024 previews into four articles, grouped by tiers. We will give you the tiers ahead of time, so you know when to expect which team in which article. Alabama still gets its own article, which published Aug. 4. Alabama is also predicted (spoiler alert!) to be a Tier I team in the SEC in 2024, so our Tier I article will have only three teams in it, plus a note to refer back to Alabama's longer preview article for our evaluation of the Crimson Tide.
We hope you will like how we do this, and we hope it proves to be an accurate analysis of the SEC in 2024.
Our 2024 fall previews will be coming out soon, over the next two weeks. The preview for Alabama went up tonight, and follows the typical format that our previews have followed dating back to 1997.
However, with the changes to the format of the SEC, we will have to make a significant change to how we put together our previews, our Rating The Units feature and the way we use the RTU findings to rank the teams. As you know, we no longer have divisions in the SEC, so there is no longer a need to group teams by East or West division. We can still use RTU to get a profile of all 16 teams, but the data that it spits out may not lend itself to the same kind of analysis we've done in the past.
There is also, for this year at least, the problem of how to rate Texas and Oklahoma with neither of them having played in the SEC before. We've fought this issue before -- the addition of Texas A&M and Missouri, for instance -- but not when both additions would have been presumptive contenders in their former conference, and especially, not in the days of unbound transfers and rosters that turn over like the inventory of milk at your local supermarket.
The other question is, absent the presence of divisions, how do we divide teams up to properly preview them? We were already running into issues in the recent past of being able to use our traditional metrics to evaluate teams coming out of spring practice, since offseason moves rendered a lot of those evaluations almost moot. We have shifted to a mid/late fall evaluation schedule, but that impacts the length and depth of what we can produce editorially in time for the season to start.
Thus, we're going to divide the 2024 previews into four articles, grouped by tiers. We will give you the tiers ahead of time, so you know when to expect which team in which article. Alabama still gets its own article, which published Aug. 4. Alabama is also predicted (spoiler alert!) to be a Tier I team in the SEC in 2024, so our Tier I article will have only three teams in it, plus a note to refer back to Alabama's longer preview article for our evaluation of the Crimson Tide.
We hope you will like how we do this, and we hope it proves to be an accurate analysis of the SEC in 2024.
