If you’re a SEC AD, you want it all right now – as many home games as possible, as attractive a strength of schedule as possible, as much TV money as possible, etc. But you’re in a conference that struggles to get its scheduling act together as it tries to fit a fourteen-school square peg into a twelve-game regular season round hole.
It’s not that you can’t have nice things. It’s that nobody’s really sure what you can have.
“We have an idea of who we’ll play, but we don’t know when we’ll play,” McGarity said of the rotating cross-divisional opponent in the 6-1-1 format that also includes six division games and the permanent cross-division partner. “We know it will be a road game because Auburn’s coming back here in 2014. Whoever we play on the West side will be a road game. It hasn’t been finalized but Destin is when we’re planning to see everything because we’ve all got to move forward with dates, campus dates, homecoming dates and things like that.”
Shoot, no wonder McGarity says there won’t be a discussion about a potential nine-game conference schedule at Destin. When would they have the time to talk about it?
Get The Picture 
Like it or not the SEC needs to go to 16 teams to make scheduling work. 14 is an oddball number of teams. Or the SEC could do what I have been suggesting for years–go back to ten teams and play a 9 game round-robin schedule where every team plays every other team in the conference each year like the Big 12 has done. That is really the only way to determine a true conference champion.
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Since we don’t know who will be the conference powers each year, every other year has the same conditions built in as if it were every 3-4yrs. Your suggestion of “true” conf champ would only occur if we all played each other every year. If we go to 9 conf foes, we accomplish the same thing, only the teams differ in strength between playing years so you can’t get around the randomness of strength played.
Figuring out the schedule with the 14 teams is easier than trying to backtrack to a 10-team conf.; besides, you would have to admit GT and throw out the 4 that have been added plus 1 team that took GT’s place yrs ago (I’m just stirring the pot on going back to 10 yrs). 🙂
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To have 7 home games all of our OOC games would have to be in Athens when Ga. Is the home team in Jax. In those years we have only 3 SEC games in Athens. Question being do we get a substantial payoff being the home team in Jax to offset the loss of not playing at home? Correct me if I do not have this figured out right.
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I’m sure the payout difference is not considered nor appreciated by local Athens merchants. And I don’t blame them.
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And they are the only ones who have a legit complaint. The ones who have that concern already owe virtually their entire business to UGA. McGarity should make decisions on what is good for UGA football, not handing the retailers a bonus while we lose the current financial advantage and one of the best traditions in CFB.
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Well, those merchants have been getting that vital can’t-live-without-it 7th home game for only what? 8 years or so? When did NCAA go to 12 game season?
Somehow I think many of them will manage.
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We make more playing in Jax every year than if we played that game at home every two.
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I kinda think playing eight conference games, then another game against the other division champ give you a pretty good idea of a true conference champion.
Of course, I also think you can skip this whole conference championship game thing and still be national champs.
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His comments about the 7th game echo what I’ve been saying. With a nine game schedule, every other year you lose a home game. From a financial perspective for the college towns how does this make sense?
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If there’s additional TV money it is possible that the worth of the 9th game to CBS/ESPN, etc offsets the loss of a home game every other year.
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Of course, if by “make sense” you mean they always need to keep what they have and only always get more, then yeah, no sense at all.
But the unbundling is coming and that’s going to change college athletics finance.
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