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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/ikedawg43 on 2025-09-22 17:22:07+00:00.
Now that On3 has reported the (alleged) SEC permanent rivals, or the semi-permanent set to be revisited in 4 years, I wanted to rank how ‘historical’ the rivalries they chose are.
Since images aren’t allowed in r/CFB, I made a copy of this post with the chart in r/secfootball you can see here: Direct Image Link
For my method, I used sports-reference.com to look up School History for Head-to-Head matchups, and sorted by total number of games played to find how many times each school has played their three ‘rivals.’ I also included the Rank, which is where that school ranks in number of times played. If a school is Rank 1, that means this is the school that has been played the most number of times for your given school. This is the best metric for historical rivalries because some schools have not been around for as long, or have changed conferences multiple times and don’t have 100+ meetings with any single school.
Ties were given an average rank if the tie was for a top rank, or for Ole Miss/OU who have played twice, I gave the highest rank possible, since they have 20+ teams they have played exactly twice.
Quick Analysis:
- Only one school (Tennessee) gets the trifecta of their top 3 historical rivals protected as their three rivals.
- Over half of schools get their #1 rank as a protected opponent. Some schools’ Rank 1 are not in the conference (e.g. Texas, who has played Baylor the most by 2 games)
- Only Texas out of the ‘newcomers’ to the conference (all former Big 12 schools) is in the top-half for historicity.
- OU & Ole Miss have the worst score because they were assigned each other, and have only played twice.
- Almost every scenario possible required someone with only two games played to be paired up.
Edit: Updated to the direct image link instead of the crosspost link