The Houston Chronicle threw a bomb into the middle of SEC Media Days yesterday with its report of Texas and Oklahoma being possible conference expansion candidates. The college football world immediately went to DEFCON 2 because the news came from a reliable, responsible reporter and was quickly followed up with corroborating stories from other reliable, responsible reporters.
It’s far too early to guess whether those teams definitely will or won’t join the conference. A decade ago, none other than Texas scuttled the Pac-16 plans at the last minute in order to keep its Longhorn Network alive. I can’t see the SEC wanting to make affordances for a single school to have its own channel, so the LHN could end up being the network that ultimately torpedoes two different proposed conference moves. Texas will have to decide what exactly it wants, and synthesizing as many reports as I can find, it sounds like they don’t actually know that yet.
If the SEC does add two more teams, there will have to be serious considerations made regarding football scheduling. No league has as many tangled historical rivalries, so a lot of hardball and horse trading would be in the offing.
Here are four options for how a 16-team format might work.
Divisions
Keeping divisions has only one real advantage: it prevents a scenario where there are three undefeated teams (or more likely, three one-loss teams) at the top who didn’t play each other. Everything else about it is not great.
The simplest thing would be to put the ‘Horns and Sooners in the West, punt the Alabama schools to the East, and move Missouri to the West where it’s a better geographic fit. Easy, right?
Doing so would put five of the SEC’s six traditional powers in the East, which would not make many of them happy. Those five happen to have a lot of sway when it comes to the conference’s internal affairs, so it’s a dubious proposition from that standpoint.
They could also do something like put Texas in the West and Oklahoma in the East and make them permanent cross-division rivals. As long as Mizzou makes “East” a misnomer, why not run with it further?
Either way, it’s a tough sell to make. Having 14 teams stretched the divisional format to its breaking point. Going to 16 would be worse unless the unlikely happens and the league enacts a schedule of ten or more games. Only completing home-and-home series with the entire rest of the league once every 14 years is a bleak prospect.
Pods
Here, there would be four groups of four teams. A team plays everyone inside its pod every year plus teams from other pods on a rotating basis.
One scheduling option gives everyone a permanent rival from another pod. For example: say Pod A has Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and Pod B has both Alabama schools in it. Georgia would get Auburn and Tennessee would get Alabama as annual opponents regardless of whether Pods A and B play each other. It’s an eight-game format: you play your three podmates, one designated rival, and four from another pod.
The problem is that when Pods A and B are matched up, the designated rivals end up a game short. There’d have to be some system set up to deal with it when those situations happen.
The nine-game pod option drops the annual non-pod rivalries. Instead, a team plays its three podmates annually, all four of a different pod, and half of yet another pod. As the SEC Network sketched it out this morning:
SEC Network, the league’s own TV channel, has some ideas. pic.twitter.com/MSnth9IYMM
— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) July 22, 2021
I’m not sure it’s workable without some major concessions. A lot of powerful people in the conference want the Cocktail Party and the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry and the Third Saturday in October and the Iron Bowl all to happen annually, but you can’t put Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee all in the same four-team pod.
Three Rivals
In this format everyone gets three annual rivals, and they won’t necessarily create neat and tidy four-team pods. Florida might still play Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee every year as we saw above, but Georgia might get Auburn, Florida, and South Carolina, while Tennessee might get Alabama, Florida, and Vanderbilt. A nine-game schedule is required here: three rivalries plus the 12 others rotating through the remaining six games.
There’s a lot to like with this format over pods. The conference’s tangled spaghetti of major rivalries can be preserved almost entirely — depending on your personal definition of “major rivalries” — even if some nice-to-have annual series like Florida-LSU will fall away.
The biggest point in its favor is this: a player who stays four years will complete a home-and-home with everyone else in the conference. Yes, pedants would append a couple asterisks to that statement for neutral site series like the Cocktail Party and Red River, but you know what I mean. This arrangement maximizes conference cohesiveness.
Three Tiers
I invented this one back in the last major realignment round, and I don’t believe I’ve seen anyone else replicate it. It’s a bit messy, but it’s the fallback plan if schools can’t all come to agreement on the Three Rivals plan.
It’s a nine-game schedule. Every team has five Tier 1 opponents that they play every year. They have four Tier 2 opponents, and they play two of them each year. They then have six Tier 3 opponents, and they also play two of them each year. You complete home-and-homes with Tier 1 foes every two years, with Tier 2 foes every four, and with Tier 3 foes every six.
Three Rivals is better because you get through all league opponents every four years instead of every six. A player can visit every stadium in the conference** in a four-year career instead of missing out on one or two in a four or five-year career. Again though, this is the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency option if they reject divisions and pods but can’t agree on Three Rivals.
Here’s an example for Florida.
Tier 1: Auburn, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee
Tier 2: LSU, Mississippi State, Missouri, Vanderbilt
Tier 3: Alabama, Arkansas, Ole Miss, Oklahoma, Texas, Texas A&M
The Gators preserve their annual rivalries with Georgia and Tennessee and get all of their current SEC East opponents as Tier 1 or Tier 2 opponents. As a bonus, the annual series with the school that’s geographically closest to Gainesville would start up again.
These aren’t pods, so Kentucky’s Tier 1 opponents might be Florida, Mississippi State, Missouri, Tennessee, and Vanderbilt. Tennessee’s could be Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, and Vandy. There would have to be a lot of arguments about preserving history and geography versus competitive balance in the long run.
If you can’t tell already, I think Three Rivals is the best option. There might be some years with major discontent about SEC Championship Game participation without divisions, but having a cohesive conference is more important than worrying about having big arguments once a decade. It’s college football: it’s all about the arguments anyway. If the conference goes to 16 teams, bring on Three Rivals.