re: Which SEC cities have the most in common and would you group together?

A&M is hard to group with some of the other SEC cities but honestly is probably closest to a mix of Gainesville and Auburn.

CS is a true college town that has about 225k in the metro and is an hour from Houston and 2 to 3 hours from the other 3 major Texas metros. The area is generally flat and doesn't get quite the rain (and thus larger trees and greenery) that most of the other SEC towns do but it is definitely in the greener part of Texas. For instance in Gainesville you can't see very far into the campus at any point because there is a bunch of 100 foot trees everywhere, in CS if you get some elevation you can see everything as the trees are rarely above 40 feet. It has rural roots but really isn't anymore even though it has no shortage of farms and ranches on the outskirts of town. Very sprawled out campus with lots of research buildings everywhere.

It is decidedly Texan though and no other SEC school has that feel to it, the food is completely different for instance than the rest of the SEC with Tex Mex and Beef BBQ ruling the roost. A&M and CS have just changed so much over time in identity it is hard to compare it to many other towns. No one else has our amazing Soviet style architecture on half our buildings though!

You are an Aggie. You don't like girls. Nice try.

It wasnt purely based off of size of city-town or geographical location. See the Fayettville-Knoxville comparison. Although I think a fair amount of the cities in the same area have a lot of tight cultural ties with each other with the exception of a few

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All 3 are small to medium sized citys with a pretty heavy college town feel to it. Tuscaloosa is a lot bigger then the Miss. schools but even then its still in the bottom half of SEC cities by city proper and metro area populations.

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Oxford is less than 20,000. Starkville is less than 24,000. Tuscaloosa alone is right at 100,000 and that's not counting Northport and other cities in the Tuscaloosa Metropolitan Area.

Tuscaloosa is also larger Auburn, Oxford, Starkville, Fayetteville (though has a smaller metro area than NWA), and is roughly the same size as Gainesville, Columbia (MO), Athens, and College Station.

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I would equate Tuscaloosa to being a "Little Detroit"

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West Tuscaloosa certainly would be.

Tuscaloosa is most similar to College Station. They even look the same when driving into them. Never been to Gainsville so I don't know of it's similar to those two, but CS and T-town are not like the Mississippi towns because they're not tiny, they're not like Knox or Fayettenam because they're both pretty flat, they're not like Nashville because they're not that big, and not like Athens or Columbia because they don't have that woodsy semi-hippie college town vibe.

Lexington's urban population is larger than Baton Rouges... however the metro is smaller because Lex is hemmed in by the horse farms and has pretty much reached its current limits. In the long run the city will have to skip the farms and expand in the surrounding counties like Woodford, Jessamine, Madison... etc.

BR has more crime than the other 13 combined

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Then from a cultural, historical, and demographic makeup, Tuscaloosa is even less similar to Oxford and Starkville.

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Besides populus numbers how could the 3 not be any more alike? Thats a genuine question.

All 3 cities have been linked together by transport for hundreds of years due to proximity, all 3 cities have above average minority populations. All cities have ties to the deep south and slavery. Bare minimum 2 of the 3 cities would have what you would consider healthy employment rates and options as well as being ranked with in top 50 places to live under XXX population. From the outside looking in all of the areas seem very rural. At the same time I didnt grow up there so I wouldnt be able to accurately say what really differentiates the areas other then population.