With Tennessee reaching the Rocky Top of the college baseball world with their win over Texas A&M in the CWS Final, the SEC has now won five consecutive national titles in baseball, with five different programs each winning one.
Combine this with the fact that three different SEC programs won a championship in the 4-team College Football playoff era and it becomes clear that the SEC is truly the premier conference in both football and baseball.
Just about every school in the conference excelled in at least one of these sports in the 2023-2024 seasons, while a few schools were elite in both. In this article, we (actually it's just me) will rank each SEC school on how well they performed in football and baseball for the 2023-2024 seasons.
These rankings are purely mathematical and so readers cannot and thus should not argue against the validity of the list. Each school was awarded 1-14 points for football and 1-14 points for baseball, based on where they finished the season (14 points for best in the league, 1 point for worst). The regular season and postseason were both taken into consideration.
Ties were broken based solely on my personal preference for the schools that were tied. Sorry, I don't make the rules (yes I do).
Again this is NOT an historical ranking of the programs, so I do not want to hear any complaining from LSU and Florida fans.
Here is the ranking of each SEC school as a Football + Baseball program for the 2023-2024 seasons.
14. Auburn - 7 points
6 points football, 1 point baseball
The first season of Hugh Freeze football was one of mild to moderate success, although they would probably be a little higher on the list if they had just rushed more than 2 defenders on the last play against Alabama. But you live and you learn (hopefully).
The Auburn baseball team's success was much more mild, and even borderline non-existent. The Tigers finished last in the league, earning themselves a measly one point in this ranking.
13. Vanderbilt - 7 points
1 point football, 6 points baseball
Vanderbilt was basically the reverse of Auburn here, having mild to moderate success in baseball and none whatsoever in football. The lack of success in football was not so shocking (no offense), but we have come to expect more out of the baseball program, who failed to host a regional this year.
As these schools were tied in terms of points, I gave the tiebreaker to Vanderbilt simply due to the fact that I don't like Auburn. Although I will say that the Vandy Whistler made this a more difficult decision than it should have been.
12. South Carolina - 9 points
4 points football, 5 points baseball
Both of these teams had kind of a "meh" type of season. The football team failed to make a bowl game while the baseball team had a losing conference record. At least the baseball team made the postseason, where they failed to advance out of the regional hosted by NC State.
There was not much for the Cocks to be cocky about this year, but we'll see if either program is able to turn things around next season.