Athlon Sports Panel Ranks Fayetteville 3rd-Worst SEC Town

Here's some quality offseason silliness.

Athlon conducted an "expert" poll to rank the 14 towns of the SEC and Fayetteville came in 12th. 12th!

Here's the list of voters. You'll notice while some may be unbiased, a good chunk of the voters live elsewhere in the SEC. I was not asked to participate and stand up for our little hamlet in the Ozarks.

I've been to every SEC town except for Auburn so I feel reasonably qualified to say Fayetteville should rank much higher on this list. Just looking at their rankings, it's clearly a better town than those directly above it, Gainesville and College Station. Fayetteville ranks pretty highly on many of the criteria they list (surrounding geography, nighlife, food, etc). About the only thing I agree with them on as a drawback is that it's not the easiest place in the world to get to.

I would rank Fayetteville probably somewhere around number 5. Athens is my favorite SEC town without question. Baton Rouge has the best food. Nashville is fantastic if you like big cities (and I do) and downtown Knoxville is pretty cool. I don't think Lexington's that great (although the horse farms and bluegrass surrounding it are lovely) and I think Tuscaloosa's overrated. Oxford is nice but it's really small and there's nothing around it.

What say you, Hog fans?