What one reporter referred to as a “major talking point” has been refuted as SEC Football Media Days get underway, and the reporter has presented calculations that demonstrate how the Big 12 outperforms the SEC in one aspect.
While attending SEC media days, Zach Barnett, a radio host on Dallas-Fort Worth station 96.7 and college football writer for FootballScoop, noted that several other attendees were mentioning the amount of one-score games played amongst SEC schools.
Barnett was able to compile some data, which indicates that the Big 12 really outperforms the SEC in terms of one-score games, both in terms of overall percentage of games played and total number of games played.
One talking point of SEC media days is how many 1-score games this conference plays, so I looked it up.
In 2023, 18 of 57 SEC games (31.6%) were within one score. Twenty-seven of 64 (42%) Big 12 games were 1-score affairs.
— Zach Barnett (@zach_barnett) July 17, 2024
Only 18 out of 57 SEC games were one-score games in 2023, compared to 27 one-score games on the Big 12’s 64-game conference schedule. That accounts for 31% of SEC matchups but 42% of Big 12 conference matchups.
According to calculations by HailWV, the ACC and Big 12 were tied overall last season in terms of one-score matches, with 42% of league games falling into that range. The Big 10 also had one-score games in about 36% of its matchups.
One “X” user also shared the side-by-side data for the SEC and Big 12 in this category since the start of the College Football Playoff era, even though we didn’t total this data for the ACC and Big 10. The Big 12 had 203 one-score games to the SEC’s 209, although the Big 12 had a larger percentage of one-score games played (42%) than the SEC (35%). This was likely due to the Big 12 having more teams than the SEC for the most of that time.
