Looking ahead to the 2018 schedule

Locks
Arkansas St
ULL
Citadel
Louisville
Missouri
@Ole Miss
@Arkansas
@Tennessee

Slim chance of competition
Texas A&M

Probably competitive
Miss State
@LSU
Auburn

Any team that can air it out has the potential to give us problems with so many new guys in the secondary and a new defensive play caller. Our pass rush will have to be on point to take some burden off the back end. That said, we should be scoring a lot of points next year so we'll have to have a poor game to lose.

LSU and Auburn are, as you listed, the toughest games by far.

Ole Miss could give an offensive scare. Ta'amu is talented and they still have all those receivers (Brown, Lodge, Metcalf) plus Jordan Wilkins and a returning line that should be pretty decent. Their defense will be awful, so we should score at will, but with the young secondary they could score some points.

Missouri could be similar.

The three toughest games will be

Miss St
Auburn
Texas A&M

Luckily all three are at home.

LSU lost everybody last year, I see them going around 7-5. Bama will have no trouble with them.

Pretty favorable schedule, all tough games at home. Arkansas, Tennessee, Ole Miss and LSU on the road scares no one.

Auburn sucks away from Jordan Hare.

Texas A&M could give the defense a lot of problems. Bama's offense will out score them.

Miss St is going to be very good next year, top 10 caliber. They don't do well in T-Town though. They could be undeafted coming into the game.

The SEC championship game will be our toughest by far

Basically locks in every game but Auburn.

see only one potential loss

It's not a great schedule, but I honestly don't see much difference in this schedule and the one we just played in 2017.

quote:

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It's not our fault the SEC is largely down.

Games like A&M, Arkansas, Ole Miss and Tennessee should be much harder on average than they have been recently or will be next year.

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Exactly. The lone difference in this schedule and last year's is we traded FSU for Louisville. We got very little credit for beating FSU this past year because they ended up being poor. Even with Francois they are maybe an 8 or 9 win regular season team instead of a 6-win team. Louisville could very well end up an 8 or 9 win team next year. Look at their schedule.

I agree with that. We've performed so well in those games that major teams are not interested in doing it and getting their butts handed to them. If we are going to have our non-conference schedule improve, it's going to have to be through the home-and-home. Otherwise you're looking at having to play lesser name P5 teams who simply love the payday and exposure and know they aren't likely to compete for a playoff berth anyway.