These games drive immense interest in a sport whose popularity is fueled by debate. Arguably the most exciting aspect of college football each season is the inter-conference matchups that usually precede conference play. That it’s not, and that it certainly won’t be assuming a 16-team conference, will create obvious long-term problems. With each addition to the conference, this is less and less the case. With its smaller size, each SEC team generally had to beat every other conference opponent in order to win the championship. Have a better idea? Well, considering the SEC placed Missouri in its East division for the past decade, the conference probably would benefit from your direction.Particularly when the SEC was twelve teams (before the addition of Texas A&M and Missouri), it was always interesting to marvel at the schedule of each team within the conference. Vanderbilt: Tennessee, Ole Miss, Texas A&M Mississippi State: Ole Miss, Kentucky, Auburn Kentucky: South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi State Vanderbilt: Tennessee, Ole Miss, Florida My Plan 2 for each team's three rivals in a 3-6 modelĪuburn: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi State South Carolina: Kentucky, Georgia, Missouri Missouri: Arkansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina Mississippi State: Ole Miss, Arkansas, Texas A&M Ole Miss: Mississippi State, Vanderbilt, LSU Kentucky: South Carolina, Auburn, Tennessee
#SEC CONFERENCE PLUS#
Here are top two options I devised for this 3-6 scheduling model (three annual rivalries, plus six rotating SEC foes): My Plan 1 for each team's three rivals in a 3-6 modelĪrkansas: Missouri, Texas, Mississippi State
Several times, I thought I had a great plan until I reached the final few puzzle pieces that wouldn’t snap into place. I devoted two hours one night this week trying to align rivalries for Option B in a way that offered a semblance of fairness. Also, this model is not ideal for creating equitable strengths of schedule – a team's schedule strength would be based, in part, on how strong its three rivals are – but surely strength of schedule would be factored in to a degree.
Preserving one rivalry may come at the expense of another team's optimal schedule. Some teams have three or more natural rivals, while others only have one or two rivalries worth protecting. Option B offers an additional conference game and preserves more annual rivalries, so if these are the two leading options, then I’ll throw my weight behind this choice.Ĭonstructing a schedule for this model is a chore, though. Each team would have one designated rival that it would play every year – think Alabama-Auburn Ole Miss-Mississippi State Florida-Georgia – and the other seven conference opponents would flip-flop each year, allowing a team to play all of its non-rival conference peers once every two years. The SEC has not finalized a scheduling model for its expanded future, but here are the leading suggestions, according to Sports Illustrated and ESPN: Oklahoma and Texas will join the SEC by the 2025 season, and that expansion could spark the end of the SEC’s division era.
The Pac-12 and Mountain West ditched divisions for 2022, and the ACC aims to do so by 2023. Thirty years later, divisions are passé, especially after the NCAA Division I Council voted last week to stop requiring conferences to have divisions to stage a league championship. That allowed the conference to stage an SEC Championship, thanks to an NCAA rule allowing such an event if a conference featured divisions. If you’re an SEC football fan of a certain age – say, around my age – you don’t have strong memories of the conference before it embraced two divisions.Īfter the SEC expanded from 10 to 12 teams by adding Arkansas and South Carolina, it boldly split into divisions in 1992.