SEC teams rate near top in 2017 schedule difficulty

ATHENS — Is anyone buying that UMass has the toughest football schedule in the country next season?

According to a set of rankings from ESPN’s Phil Steele, which assessed all 130 FBS schedules for the 2017 season, the Minutemen have quite the season ahead of them.

And while that may be hard to believe, what isn’t hard to believe is the teams that follow UMass on the list. The SEC is again loaded with some of the most difficult schedules in the country, led by LSU with a schedule that ranks No. 2 in the nation. The Tigers play BYU, Chattanooga, Syracuse and Troy in nonconference games.

South Carolina and Vanderbilt join the Tigers in the top 10 of these rankings, which Steele derived from the “opponents’ record metric.” Steele explains that this is the metric used by the NCAA and not a method he developed on his own.

The shortcoming in this method is that it doesn’t account for the players or coaches an opponent may have lost from the 2016 season.

It also makes an assumption that a good team in 2016 equals a good team in 2017. That’s not necessarily the case, as college football programs can move up and down quickly.

Alabama’s schedule ranks 12th of the 14 SEC teams at No. 54. That can be attributed, in part, to the fact that Alabama does not have Alabama on its schedule.