Once again, here are the 2020 SEC standings.
And here are the APR standings with conference rank in offensive touchdowns, touchdowns allowed, and APR in parentheses. This includes conference games only with the championship game excluded. Since teams played a varied number of games (every team in the SEC played at least nine and most of the teams played ten), the rankings are on a per game basis, not raw totals.
Finally, SEC teams are sorted by the difference between their actual number of wins and their expected number of wins according to APR.
I use a game and a half as an arbitrary line of demarcation to determine if a team significantly over or under-performed relative to their APR. By that standard, a pair of Tigers in Auburn and Missouri significantly overachieved. Auburn was only 2-1 in one-score conference games, but they also scored three non-offensive touchdowns in SEC action while allowing none. Two of those non-offensive touchdowns proved decisive in helping the Tigers snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. A blocked punt that resulted in a touchdown provided the winning margin against Arkansas, while a long interception return touchdown resulted in a likely fourteen-point swing in their thirteen-point win against Tennessee. Meanwhile Missouri managed a 3-0 record in one score conference games to eke out a .500 record despite allowing ten more touchdowns than they scored in SEC play.
Did the SEC Become the Big 12 (But With Better Players)?
One season after LSU made their a case as the best college football team of the new millennium and perhaps by extension, all time, and two seasons after Clemson did the same, Alabama fielded arguably the best college football team ever in 2020. With all the testing, disjointed schedules, canceled games, and other assorted issues that go along with contesting a college football season in the midst of a global pandemic, its debatable how closely 2020 can be compared to previous seasons. However, you would have to be willfully ignorant to downplay how dominant Alabama was in 2020. The Crimson Tide won twelve of their thirteen games by double digits and those thirteen opponents all happened to be Power Five teams, so there were no cupcakes on the schedule. In the process of winning yet another national title, Alabama became the thirteenth Power Five/BCS conference team to average at least six offensive touchdowns per game in conference play in the APR era (since 2005). The Crimson Tide also scored the most offensive touchdowns of any Power Five/BCS conference team in league play, but since they got to play ten conference games, I'll do my best Ford Frick impression and sully their accomplishment with an asterisk.
If you take a look back at the APR standings a few lines up, you might notice Alabama was not the only SEC offense that was humming in 2020. Ole Miss and Florida also averaged five or more offensive touchdowns per game and five SEC defenses allowed at least four touchdowns per game. In fact, for the first time since I have been tracking APR data (since 2005), SEC teams actually scored more offensive touchdowns in conference play than Big 12 teams.
Is 2020 an outlier, the result of an odd season played in challenging circumstances, or is this the new normal for the SEC? The SEC may not always outpace the Big 12 in scoring (2020 was their lowest offensive touchdown production in a decade), but SEC teams did average an extra touchdown per game compared to their output in 2005. With the conference consistently getting the best players and the rules of the game tilting ever more in the favor of offense, its hard to envision things going back to the relative Dead-ball Era the SEC experienced in the late aughts.
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