How Pac-12 South Compares to SEC West Division
It has more ranked teams than unranked ones. It features a previously ranked team that just fell out of the poll. And its bottom feeder, while winless at this point, is much improved from a year ago and seems poised to knock someone off sooner rather than later.
Are we talking about the SEC West? Yes. But we're also referring to the Pac-12 South.
There are an uncanny number of similarities between the nation's best division and one that's making a strong case for being the SEC West's understudy. One has five of seven teams currently ranked in the Associated Press Top 25; the other has four of six; while the fifth-best club began the season in the rankings and just fell out after a loss on Saturday.
.jpg?w=256 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
The quality of the teams from top to bottom has made it so that unbeaten teams are underdogs this week despite playing at home, according to Odds Shark, and both divisions are considered so deep that the likelihood of a team coming out of there unblemished seems small.
Since there have been no head-to-head meetings between the divisions, it's hard to really compare them to each other in terms of performance. The chart below lists how each has fared in a handful of quantifiable categories:
| Record vs. Power 5 opponents | 3-1 | 4-0 |
| Record in nonconference road games | 5-1 | 4-0 |
| Record vs. nonconference ranked opponents | 0-0 | 2-0 |
Those numbers clearly show the SEC West is the better division, but that's not really in question. The Pac-12's figures are good, too, but despite that and the divisions' other commonalities, there's one place where the SEC West and Pac-12 South differ immensely: the court of public opinion, as Bryan Fischer of NFL.com pointed out earlier this week:
Fischer is referring to the leagues as a whole, but with the majority of each conference's ranked teams in these two divisions (each has two ranked on the other side, and combined make up 52 percent of the AP Top 25), the attention is being placed mostly on the SEC West and Pac-12 South. This was enhanced by last week's results involving Pac-12 schools, with North power Stanford and Oregon both losing.
Oregon's loss came to Arizona, which vaulted the Wildcats into the top 10 after being unranked a week ago. Utah jumped into the rankings as well after beating UCLA, also on the road, while Arizona State moved up (and knocked out USC) by winning in Los Angeles on a Hail Mary.
That kind of cannibalism is similar to what went on in the SEC West and is what will continue throughout the season. Last Saturday saw Ole Miss top Alabama for the first time in a decade, while Mississippi State downed fellow unbeaten Texas A&M and Auburn blew out sliding LSU.
The only teams in those divisions not involved in the chaos last week were their respective cellar dwellers, Arkansas and Colorado. They're a combined 0-5 in league play, but both look much better than they did in 2013 and may very well pick off a ranked opponent very soon.
(Arkansas has a great chance to do so this Saturday, hosting a vulnerable Alabama team.)
It will be more of the same this week, with the Pac-12 South also involved in a huge intra-divisional clash between UCLA and Oregon. Those were the preseason favorites in the conference, but with each heading into the game after a loss it's become an unofficial elimination game for playoff consideration.
"Is all the parity a good thing?," writes George Schroeder of USA Today. "At this point, there doesn't appear to be an elite team in the bunch."
The SEC West faces the same possibility by the time the regular season is done, yet the narrative is more about how such parity means it deserves to land half of the College Football Playoff semifinal berths.
Follow Brian J. Pedersen on Twitter at @realBJP.
.jpg?w=480 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
