When the SEC announced its annual opponents for the next four seasons, most of the pairings made sense at first glance. Alabama-Auburn made sense; geography played its part, and everyone got their expected dance partners. But dig a little deeper into how Greg Sankey and his team actually constructed this schedule, and Oklahoma versus Ole Miss stands out as particularly revealing about where the conference thinks these programs are headed.

Sankey’s been pretty open about the methodology, and it’s more sophisticated than you might think. “You know, like the Oklahoma-Texas games that are obvious, Tennessee and Vanderbilt in in-state rivals. We have the Iron Bowl, we go through that,” Sankey explained when discussing the scheduling process.

Then he went on to detail how they used predicti

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