Best Year-Over-Year SEC Football Team Improvements

Now that the 2024 college football regular season has come and gone and we know which 12 teams are headed to the College Football Playoff across Tennessee sports betting, it’s worth taking a look back at which programs in America’s eminent NCAA football conference improved the most this fall.

Thanks to the outsized exploits of quarterback Diego Pavia, the plucky Vanderbilt Commodores managed to notch the biggest year-over-year jump in win totals across the 16-team SEC, going from 0-8 in conference play and 2-10 overall in 2023 to 3-5 and 6-6 in 2024, while the South Carolina Gamecocks also thrived in 2024, going from 3-5 and 5-7 to 5-3 and 9-3 overall.

As we head into bowl season and the College Football Playoff, BetTennessee.com wanted to see which teams in the SEC had the best year-over-year improvement. Using Sports-Reference.com, we pulled the in conference winning percentage and Simple Rating System (SRS), which takes average point differential and strength of schedule into account, for each team in the current SEC from last season and this season. We then ranked the teams based on greatest improvement within the conference based on average ranking for both data points.

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Best YoY SEC Improvement

Rank	Team	Avg. Rank
1	Vanderbilt Commodores	1
2	South Carolina Gamecocks	2
3	Arkansas Razorbacks	3
4	Florida Gators	4
5	Tennessee Volunteers	4.5
6	Texas A&M Aggies	5.5
7	Ole Miss Rebels	6.5
T-8	Texas Longhorns	8
T-8	Auburn Tigers	8
10	LSU Tigers	9.5

When broken down by the aforementioned metrics, it seems like Pavia and the Commodores from Vanderbilt were the top team in 2024, with an average rank of one across all categories to rank ahead of the Gamecocks’ rank of two and the Arkansas Razorbacks’ aggregate total of three.

Throw in the Florida Gators at No. 4 in the SEC with an average ranking of four and the Tennessee Volunteers at five with an average ranking of 4.5 and you have the top five in the SEC this year. The Texas A&M Aggies (5.5 average rank), Ole Miss Rebels (6.5 average rank), Texas Longhorns and Auburn Tigers (eight average rank) and LSU Tigers (9.5 average rank) also made the SEC’s top 10 in 2024.

Still, in 2024 it seemed like no one could topple the underdogs from Nashville in the SEC, as the Commodores finished with the conference’s best year-over-year gridiron glow-up to reach the Birmingham Bowl, the program’s first bowl game since the Texas Bowl in 2018.

After the enthusiasm the Commodores garnered this year, go ahead and bookmark our Vanderbilt Commodores football betting guide to be updated ahead of next season.

USA Today photo by Jake Crandall/ Advertiser.

Author

Christopher Boan

Christopher Boan writes for BetTennessee.com and has been covering sports and sports betting for more than seven years, with experience at ArizonaSports.com, the Tucson Weekly and the Green Valley News.