Alabama Football: Ranking Crimson Tide’s 2020 opponents by difficulty

Who are Alabama football’s toughest opponents in 2020?

The SEC finally released their plans for the 2020 college football season, and Alabama football fans should be happy. In their new 10-game schedule, the Crimson Tide added Kentucky and Missouri to their list of opponents. With plenty of other challenging teams on the docket, this helps balance out the power of the SEC and gives the Tide a legitimate chance of an undefeated season.

Let’s do a bit of a deep dive into all of Alabama’s opponents for the upcoming year. Some will be easy wins, while others will be bigger challenges than usual. Nothing is certain, but we can look into the future and predict how these games will go for Alabama football.

Now, the typical difficulty equation must be tweaked for the 2020 college football season. We usually put a lot of weight into the location of these games. In sports betting, it can cause up to a three-point swing in betting lines. One team might be better than another, but the location might make the inferior opponent a more difficult matchup. Location still matters, but nowhere near as much as it usually does. With no guarantee for fans in the stands, these rankings will use location mostly to break some ties. This both helps and hurts the Crimson Tide in 2020. It will almost definitely make their LSU matchup an easier battle, but it will be tougher to beat Georgia at home without a packed stadium.

I’ve also decided to put the opponents into tiers. Let’s start with the bottom tier. Alabama should be able to win these games with their bench players.