Welp, let’s just water down the regular season a little more, NCAA.
Currently, a conference must play a full round-robin schedule to hold a championship game if it does not have two divisions, as the Big 12 has done since 2017. (The American Athletic Conference has operated for the last two years with an exemption waiver.)
But on April 28, the NCAA Football Oversight Committee recommended the Division I Council remove the requirements to hold a conference championship game and exempt it from the maximum number of games. This recommendation, which is not official but expected to be approved by the Council later this month, would allow conferences freedom to determine who competes in the conference championship game.
I mean, who can argue against freedom, right? Especially if it means being free to deliver the best seedings for the college football playoffs. Talk about your righteous cause!
And before some of you jump my case about how much it sucks that Georgia doesn’t go to College Station for two more years and that needs to be fixed… well, I agree that it sucks, but nobody’s holding a gun to Greg Sankey’s head to make him stick to an eight-game conference schedule. All this bullshit is a matter of choice for the P5 and right now the desire is to make the regular season the most efficient postseason delivery operation it can be.
Although I have to admit it’s amusing, in a sad sort of way, that these humps can tweak the regular season like this, but still can’t figure out a way to expand the CFP.
Get The Picture 
Can Elon Musk buy the NCAA?
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He might call purchasing the Passaic River a better deal…
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It amazes me that Jordan Davis getting paid to put is face on a Morgan and Morgan (For the People!) billboard ruins college football as we know it but those for whom college as they know it has been ruined never blame the guys in Armani suits with open collar shirts who took a sport with regional identity and made it a billion dollar industry while trying to impose an NFL playoff structure.
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The problem is not that the SEC plays 8 games, or that we don’t go to College Station enough, or that the CFP only has 4 teams. The problem is that conference expansion has us shoehorning too many teams into too little space on the schedule. An SEC schedule is always going to be tougher than an ACC/Big 12/Big 10/Pac 12 schedule. I’m all for interesting OOC games, but adding Texas and OU is going to cost us the Auburn game. The SECC is an annual gem, want to lose that? I’m happy to play them, or TAMU, but they aren’t the SEC I care about. And adding a couple of layers of blowouts to the CFP seems stupid. Blowouts in the semis are more common than thrillers, and if you think Bama fans are wailing about Metchie and Williams now, wait until they get hurt in a 45-3 quarterfinal blowout of Iowa.
I get that the addiction to TV money has wrought this. I get that the TV guys want more product, for which they can get rich selling ads. The pundits, want more to pundit about. The college suits see more money and ignore the mo’ problems part. Just FTMF. Instead of whining about pie in the sky, maybe they should just let us enjoy what we have.
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When the Auburn game is gone as an annual game, I’m likely out.
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this is why i am in FAVOR of schedule changes. I want three permanent rivals and rotate the rest. Not because I just can’t wait for Georgia to play in Norman, OK, but because the day they take away the deep south’s oldest rivalry or the WLOCP is the day Georgia football dies to me.
(who the hell am I kidding I’ll still be watching Georgia when we’re playing against the Moon Academy in Dublin, Ireland but still. It’s the principle of the matter lol.)
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The continued sausage manufacturing of college football parity, is making great off season entertainment.
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The CFP should end every statement about requirements with “except for Notre Dame”.
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Does the NCAA dictate to the Ivy League?
Maybe UGA, gumps, ditch lizards, reform school, ole piss, maroonies, hillbillies, blue chickenshit pussy cats, hell s u, and the sea men (for everyone’s cupcake game) form the Kudzu League and tell the NCAA to FU?
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The only way we can keep the Auburn game in a 16-school SEC is to go to a 9-game conference schedule. Period. Regardless of championship format. The only way we can keep the Auburn game AND play in every stadium more than once a decade is to go to a 9-game conference schedule AND have exactly this rule change, so we can go to a divisionless scheduling format with 3 annual opponents and 6 every-other-year opponents. As UGA fans, all this rule change does is clarify that we need to be pushing hard for 9 SEC games and divisionless play, rather than the plan with 4 mini-divisions. I think the push for TV inventory will help us a lot on the 9-game front, because the more times Texas and OU play teams like us, Auburn, and Florida, the more money Mickey makes. More SEC games on the schedule means that the SEC media rights get more valuable per annum. So, the biggest emphasis in our lobbying should be for a divisionless, 3-6 format.
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Worst-case scenario would be that we go to 9 games and still lose the Auburn game because of silly mini-divisions. If we stay at 8 (we won’t), then we can still schedule Auburn out-of-conference in years when they aren’t on our conference schedule (I know it sounds weird, nut UNC just did it with one of their in-state rivals, so it can be done). If we go to divisionless play, we keep them every year. If we go to 4 mini-divisions, I don’t think anyone’s really sure how that all shakes out.
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A 16-team conference with two 8-team divisions playing a 9-game conference schedule means that a program would visit every program in the other division at least once every seven years, which is more often than is the case now.
So, no, we don’t need to push for division-less play. Not that it matters…
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I guess you’re moving Auburn and Bama to the East to preserve our annual game with them? That would work. Do you think the current West teams (I’m thinking LSU) would go along with losing their annual Bama and Auburn games?
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Nevermind me. I did my math wrong. That would work. I just don’t get the impression that “every team in seven years and every stadium in 14” is going to go over well across the league as a whole. Maybe I’m off on that, but the political momentum seems to be toward either pods / mini-divisions or a 3-6 divisionless system. Of those two, divisionless play seems to me more likely to check our boxes.
If I remember correctly, you prefer two divisions because you dislike tie-breakers, and you think divisionless play would require that we use more of them to pick the two SECCG participants? I see the pull of that argument, but I’m not convinced that a 3-6 system would result in more use of tie-breakers than a 2-division system. It’s a fun question, thought, from a math perspective. Has anyone already projected that out, or have I found a new rabbit-hole project for this week?
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If you move Auburn and Alabama to the East, I assume the SEC ditches the concept of permanent cross-division opponents, which means with a nine-game conference schedule, a team in one division faces every team in the opposing division within three or four years.
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Come the next round of expansion, I have a hard time seeing how Alabama and Auburn both remain permanent opponents for LSU, regardless of the format.
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Could that mean the SEC could use the current 13th game limit for a first round 4 team playoff since the SECCG would not count as a game against the maximum? That would be…interesting. Lots of pros and cons in that scenario.
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I thought the 13th game was only for people who played Hawaii?
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Well as long as we preserve the Missouri game…
… said nobody ever
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