Where every SEC team ranks in ESPN’s final preseason SP+ rankings
By Jacob Moss
Published:
The start of the 2026 college football season has finally almost arrived, and that means that major sports outlets around the country are putting together their final preseason rankings in anticipation of the new campaign.
The official preseason Coaches Poll was released last week, and now ESPN has just put out its final preseason SP+ rankings as well. SP+ is a predictive model built by analyst Bill Connelly that takes several different stats and projections and uses them to both rank teams and predict game outcomes from week to week.
Like most other pre-season rankings, the SEC is featured very heavily in Connelly’s list, and here is where every squad from the nation’s deepest conference ended up landing.
- No. 4 – Georgia
- No. 6 – Texas
- No. 9 – Texas A&M
- No. 10 – LSU
- No. 11 – Oklahoma
- No. 13 – Alabama
- No. 14 – Tennessee
- No. 16 – Ole Miss
- No. 19 – Missouri
- No. 20 – Florida
- No. 24 – South Carolina
- No. 26 – Auburn
- No. 29 – Vanderbilt
- No. 44 – Arkansas
- No. 47 – Kentucky
- No. 52 – Mississippi State
Unsurprisingly, Connelly’s model had more teams from the SEC ranked inside the top 25 of his model than any other conference, with 11, with the Big Ten following at just 8.
Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that nearly the entire conference is ranked inside the top 30 of the SP+, with only Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi State falling outside of that window.
It’s clear that, at least in Connelly’s model, the SEC is still the gold standard in college football.
