Georgia Football Fans Should Prepare For Missouri Dominance
If the toughest games come against the teams that hate you, Georgia football fans should go ahead and count on Missouri as a challenger for the SEC East title for the next decade or so.
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Football is a game of emotion, and in the Southeastern Conference, emotion is driven by rivalries. With the haves and have-nots varying little from season to season, schedule difficulty boils down to who hates who – the more good teams that hate your team, the tougher your trips to the water cooler in the fall.
If rivalries determine the destinies of SEC football teams, go ahead and pencil Missouri in the SEC Championship game. You won’t be right every year, but over the next ten years, you’ll come out ahead.
On the Map of SEC Rivalries, Missouri does not exist. Missouri has no SEC Rivals. No school gets emotional about beating Missouri, and that is a huge advantage in the fanatical fall religion of southern football.
For Georgia, SEC success is determined by games with four teams that want to beat the Bulldogs very badly. The Florida and Auburn games first and the Tennessee and South Carolina games second. To the west, Alabama’s season boils down to Auburn , then Tennessee or LSU followed by Florida.
But no one hates Missouri – at least not much.
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Andrew Tabor of collegespun.com lists Missouri’s three biggest rivals as Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Kansas. Bret Weisband of saturdaydownsouth.com lists Missouri’s three biggest rivals as Kansas, Arkansas and South Carolina. But let’s get real here – both of these fine articles were compelled to name three rivals for Missouri. When Weisband listed the top three rivals for every other team in the SEC, Missouri was not once mentioned as a rival.
Reflect on that for a moment. Missouri ranks as a top three rival for no SEC team. Even fellow conference newbie Texas A&M ranked in one teams list of top three rivals (Arkansas). By contrast, in Weisband’s list, LSU ranks in five SEC teams list of top three rivals and Georgia in four.
No one circles in red the date of the Missouri game.
No one stands in the middle of orientation shouting, “OK freshman, let’s beat Missouri this year!”
In David B. Tyler and Joe B. Cobbs Rating rivals by conference, Missouri did not rate at all for eight SEC schools and rated below 1.00 for four SEC schools. Missouri received it’s highest rivalry rating of 4.50 from Arkansas. (Kansas is named as Missouri’s biggest rival by Weisband and Tabor. But Missouri does not rate even for Kansas.) By comparison, for Georgia, as a rival Florida rates 40.94, Auburn 20.35, South Carolina 8.38, and Tennessee 5.99. (Georgia Tech rates 20.81)
Will Missouri gain an SEC rival? Arkansas eventually gained a rival in LSU. And even Texas A&M has a pretty decent hate going with LSU and Arkansas.
Arkansas is the new Missouri designated rival. The geographic proximity is beneficial to a good hate and the two schools will play at the end of the season. It’s contrived, but it’s a start.
Evin Demirel of arkansasfight.com, examining the mutual rival adoption from the Arkansas perspective, elicited this quote from former Razorback Matt Jones, “I believe in the next decade or so it will be a good rivalry.”
Look forward to a decade of Missouri overachieving.