With the Oklahoma Sooners and the Texas Longhorns scheduled to join the SEC in 2025, the future football scheduling format was a primary topic of discussion at the annual SEC Spring meetings in Destin, Fla., this week.
The SEC currently plays an eight-game conference football schedule that consists of six games against the other teams in the division, one permanent cross-division opponent, and one rotating cross-division opponent. That model was previously adopted primarily to preserve longstanding rivalries such as Georgia-Auburn, Alabama-Tennessee, etc.
The downside to that model, however, is that the rotating opponents do not cycle through fast enough. For instance, Texas A&M joined the league in 2012 and didn’t travel to play Georgia until the 2019 season. And under that same format, Georgia will not make the return trip to College Station until 2024, a full 12 years after the Aggies entered the SEC.
Additionally, according to college football writer Matt Smith, there is another crazy scheduling anomaly involving Texas A&M.
With Oklahoma and Texas entering the SEC in 2025, the conference’s membership roster will expand to 16 teams. So keeping the 6-1-1 format would further exacerbate the rotation of non-permanent opponents.
The league will also likely scrap their divisional format now that the NCAA has relaxed their restrictions for conference championship game participants. Previously, conferences had to be split into even divisions in order to stage a championship game.
Per several reports, the SEC has narrowed down their future football scheduling format discussion to two models. The first, dubbed the 1-7 format, is an eight-game conference schedule where each team plays one permanent opponent and seven rotating opponents each season. Under that format, teams would cycle through every other team on their schedule home and away every four years.
The 1-7 format would also allow each SEC team to continue to schedule four non-conference opponents each season.
The second model reportedly under consideration is the 3-6 format, which would consist of three permanent opponents and six rotating opponents. That would also allow each team to play every other team home and away in a four year period.
However, the 3-6 model would see each teams’ non-conference schedule reduced from four to three games. Additionally, a 3-6 model would create an imbalance in the league schedule with four home games and five road games every other season. That could cause issues for some teams that like to play seven or even eight home games each season to obtain additional revenue.
Additionally, adding an extra conference game to the schedule and removing one non-conference game might be detrimental to some league teams (cough, cough…Vanderbilt) in terms of qualifying for a postseason bowl game each year.
Alabama head coach Nick Saban has long been in favor of a nine-game conference schedule, and Florida Director of Athletics Scott Stricklin also favors nine games.
“There is some fatigue in our current scheduling model,” Stricklin told SI.com. “I don’t know where we’re going to end up but it does appear we’re going to have a lot more rotation, so we get to see everybody and every stadium once in a four-year period.”
Whatever the outcome, it won’t be decided this week, according to comments made by SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey earlier on Friday.