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I hate to be a buzzkill during the early days of the offseason, but I’m about to be one. SEC teams will endure multi-win regressions in 2025. It’s inevitable.
In 2024, Oklahoma (-4), Alabama (-3), Kentucky (-3), Mississippi State (-3) and Georgia (-2) all suffered multi-win regressions. Granted, OU’s -4 regression also came with a move to the SEC and an entirely different schedule.
What’s inevitable is that several SEC teams will have a significant dip in the win column. Buzzkill, I know.
4 SEC teams most likely to regress in 2025
Vanderbilt
Wait a minute. Diego Pavia is back, as is go-to target Eli Stowers, offensive coordinator Tim Beck and Jerry Kill. How can Vandy possibly fit this description after a storybook 2024 season? While I’m a massive supporter of what Clark Lea did in 2024 with the New Mexico State-to-Vandy migration, let’s look at the facts. Vandy is coming off a 7-win season. This is a program that earned consecutive bowl berths once in program history. Lea himself has never had consecutive 4-win seasons, much less consecutive bowl berths.
As we know, it’s not a place that’s loaded with elite recruiting classes or top transfer portal additions. The margin for error is slim. Six of Vandy’s 7 wins were by 10 points or less. If next year was a 4-8 regression to the mean, would it stun the outside world? Definitely not, especially with their first 5 SEC games coming against teams that won at least 9 games last year, 3 of which will be on the road. That doesn’t include road trips to Virginia Tech and Tennessee to bookend the season.
Avoiding a multi-win regression would qualify 2025 as plenty turnt, as well (I’ll show myself out).
Ole Miss
Kiffin just recorded 9-win seasons in consecutive years for the first time. Unlike some of the others on this list, he’s coming off a disappointing season. So why could a regression be in store? A few reasons. One is that Jaxson Dart is off to the NFL after 3 years rewriting the Ole Miss record books. Kiffin’s 2 worst seasons at Ole Miss happened with first-year starters at quarterback. Even though I’m bullish on Austin Simmons, there are still questions about his surroundings.
Can Kiffin find answers in the backfield after that issue plagued them all year? What about that defense that finally broke through in 2024? Gone are the likes of Princely Umanmielen, Walter Nolen, Jared Ivey, JJ Pegues, all of whom were dominant on the defensive line. That unit feels like it’s destined for a significant regression after it was a top-5 unit in 2024.
It’s not that Ole Miss is expected to fall off the face of the earth, but even with a schedule that projects to be among the most favorable in the SEC, is an 8-win season a likely result? Absolutely.
Mizzou
It’s not often that you see a 10-win team with a -29 scoring margin in conference play, especially in the SEC. Mizzou’s strange 2024 season was also the final year of standouts Brady Cook, Luther Burden III, Theo Wease, Armand Membou and Johnny Walker Jr. There’s a major transition in store for Eli Drinkwitz’s squad after it completed its best 2-year stretch in a decade.
Part of this is that Beau Pribula is a bit of a wild card after transferring from Penn State. As intriguing of a player as he is — and not because he hit the portal ahead of the Playoff — he’s still got plenty to prove as a QB1 with a full passing-game arsenal. Can Drinkwitz and Kirby Moore turn him into something similar to the 2023 version of Cook? That’ll determine what type of regression is in store.
The good news for Mizzou is that the schedule lines up extremely well. Only 2 opponents won 9 games in 2024, and both of those games (South Carolina and Alabama) are at home. The bad news is that Mizzou has never had 3 consecutive 9-win seasons in program history. Anything short of that and a multi-win regression will be clinched.
South Carolina
For what it’s worth, I have the Gamecocks as a preseason top-10 team with a household name returning on both sides of the ball in quarterback LaNorris Sellers and edge-rusher Dylan Stewart. Shane Beamer’s squad was one of the best in America during the latter half of the regular season, and while I didn’t argue for it to be Playoff-worthy, I certainly would’ve been intrigued to see that squad in the field.
But the Gamecocks are a regression candidate for obvious reasons. They lost a ton of production on defense, most notably Nagurski Award winner Kyle Kennard, who was a revelation in his first and only season in Columbia after transferring from Georgia Tech. TJ Sanders might be a 1st-Round pick in the 2025 NFL Draft, as could safety Nick Emmanwori. Plus, NFL-bound Tonka Hemingway was one of the more underrated SEC players of the last few years. That group is facing a ton of turnover, and as talented as Stewart is, he’ll now be at the top of every scouting report without the dominant veterans that he was surrounded by in 2024.
In the 123 years of football at South Carolina, Steve Spurrier is the only coach to lead consecutive 9-win seasons. History is working against Beamer, but then again, it was when South Carolina took down AP Top 25 teams in 3 consecutive weeks for the first time in program history.
Perhaps Beamer isn’t done defying the odds.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
