I honestly don’t understand those people who feel the need to suck the joy out of college football in the name of fairness. Here’s a new super terrific idea from John Adams of The Knoxville News Sentinel: get rid of rivalries.
The SEC spring meetings, which begin this week, always bring out the constructive critic in me.
Today’s target: the SEC football schedule.
The SEC could improve its method of determining division champions.
That would mean putting an end to non-divisional rivalries on an annual basis.
Yep – he wants to do away with Alabama and Tennessee playing each year. And he doesn’t need to see Georgia and Auburn, the originators of the oldest football rivalry in the South, play annually, either.
Essentially, he’s bothered by the fact that in certain years one contending team faces a tougher conference slate than a competitor (he uses this year’s Georgia-Florida schedules as examples). But here’s the thing: you never really know what you’re going to get in a specific year in the SEC. There are years when a good team flops; there are years when a bad team proves competitive. Plus, over time this stuff tends to balance out.
What’s most irritating about his article is that it ignores history.
Traditionalists might cringe at the thought. But the SEC shoved tradition aside a long time ago when it went to divisional play.
Nice shot – except the SEC didn’t have balanced schedules before divisional play. So there have always been years where one conference team had a easier slate than another. It’s a tradition, you might say.
Bad idea.
Get The Picture 
Is this guy serious? What makes the SEC the best & toughest conference in the country year in and year out is the tradition of rivalries! It breeds competition and last time I checked that’s the point of playing.
I don’t ever want the Dawgs to be excluded from the MNC conversation because we play in a weak conference, or don’t play a tough schedule. If and when we get there, we need to earn it dammit! Otherwise we’re likely to get humiliated (I’m looking at you warrior rainbows & buckeyes).
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To back up your point on the whole ‘tradition’ thing, and what a complete idiot the Sentinel author is, the Dawgs and Vols, going into the 1992 season (first year of divisional play), had only played 17 times in 100 years of football for UGA. Not to mention that there were years before divisional play when Bama played 8 conference games and Georgia would only play 5 or 6.
Give us the tougher schedules, we’ll prove ourselves. (Dawgs and the SEC as a whole.
Go Dawgs!
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