I know I risk sounding like a broken record, but a lot of SEC football programs can’t quit eight games, baby.
Emerson and Suttles, who’ve been on the mother, name names ($$).
Preserving secondary rivalries, plus simply having one more conference game, were why the nine-game model was thought to be the favorite heading into the week. The athletic directors at Alabama and Florida have publicly said they favor the nine-game model, Georgia is among those thought to favor it, too, and indications were the league office itself preferred it.
But proponents of the eight-game model, including Mississippi State, Kentucky and Arkansas, per a league source, made arguments that have made some schools re-think their vote…
“Re-think” is an interesting choice of verb there. Clearly there’s some wavering going on. And according to them, it’s not just about bowl eligibility.
… A prominent reason is what other conferences are doing: The ACC looks set to stay at eight games, and the Pac-12 may go back to eight. That concern was alluded to this week by Nick Saban, a longtime proponent of going to nine games.
“If we’re going to play nine conference games we’re going to end up playing probably five minimal top-15 teams in the country, and I’m talking about all of us, not just our team. How’s that going to compare to other conferences?” Saban said. “And what kind of opportunity: You could have a great team and lose two games in our conference, and somebody in another conference went undefeated but didn’t have the same opportunity to play as many good teams.”
As the saying goes, when you haven’t lost Nick Saban…
Meanwhile, Andy Staples ($$) rages against the dying of the light.
Did you spot the dumb one? Of course you did. It’s the 1-7 model. If a bunch of allegedly intelligent people got together and decided that Texas and Texas A&M — or Georgia and Auburn or Alabama and Tennessee — shouldn’t play annually when a reasonable possibility exists, then whoever voted to adopt that model should find a new line of work. They lack the common sense to sell football games for a living, and that calls into question their decision-making in every other matter as well. The Big Ten is likely about to change its scheduling model in the near future. Can you imagine that league’s leaders saying “We don’t need Michigan and Michigan State to play EVERY year?” Of course not.
The 3-6 model is the only logical choice.
Shit, dude. What’s logic got to do with it? It wasn’t logical for the SEC to stick with an eight-game conference schedule after the last round of expansion. Why expect things to be different now?
Get The Picture 
A&M and Missouri began the fraying of the fabric of the league. Texas and Oklahoma are likely to rip the fabric at the seams.
We have more in common with some ACC schools now than we do with some of the schools in our own conference.
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Definitely more history with some ACC schools, no doubt
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This isn’t far from the truth.
When the Big XII was created, they sacrificed Nebraska-Oklahoma and, to a lesser degree, Nebraska-Colorado as annual rivalry games. While they had a lot of problems (generally radiating from somewhere in Central Texas), losing those long-standing and competitive rivalry games surely didn’t help.
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Goes back to the basic premise that at it’s core college football is a regional sport.
But, Mickey could not care less if anyone is in the seats….. it’s just content.
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I think Mickey wants butts in the seats. Otherwise, why do they pan to the crowd after a big play?
I would be totally fine with an 8-game conference schedule with 2 or 3 permanent opponents. I do want the big OOC game whether that’s on a neutral field or home and home (I prefer home and home). I want our in-state rivalry because I want to throw the Drought on the ash heap of history.
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Neutral field games screw over the season ticket holders and don’t have the feel of a home game for either team. Home and home with big name OOC opponents is the way to go. Playing Notre Dame in Atlanta or Nashville or Charlotte wouldn’t have been nearly as great as the games in South Bend and Athens. Both of those games are the stuff of legend, the kind of games people tell their children and grandchildren about going to. A regular season, one off, matchup at a neutral site is just another game. It is also a game the season ticket holders have to buy an expensive ticket to outside of their donation and season ticket purchase.
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Charlotte with Clemson was absolutely spectacular this year. The atmosphere felt like a playoff game at the beginning of the year. It will be the same in Atlanta, and we have the home and home games.
I said I want big OOC home and home games. The ND game in Athens is the best environment I’ve experienced for a game in person. I didn’t go to South Bend, but that had to be great as well.
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I doubt Oregon will bring the fans Clemson brought to Charlotte. I expect the crowd to be 80% Georgia. Home and home with Oregon would be neat. UCLA came to Athens when I was a student, it was a blast having a team from that far away in town.
Georgia/Clemson is always an electric atmosphere, no matter where it is played. The two programs and fan bases simply don’t like each other. I think Georgia and Clemson could play in New Zealand and the place would be full and loud.
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I agree. I wanted the home and home with Oregon to happen. Bandon Dunes was calling my name. I’ll definitely go out to the Rose Bowl for UCLA.
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When I mentioned Atlanta, I mean when we’re playing Clemson in MBS.
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Hmmm….. I remember once upon a time, a young, breakaway league, that began south and west of the Appalachians, and spread to the Mississippi, but no further….
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I’m just a guy sitting in a $40 million airplane watching as the five drunk guys in the cockpit argue over how best to land it.
Fuck the SEC, man. Look, the idiots who cheer for Mississippi State or Vanderbilt or Kentucky need to wise up to the fact that ever since the advent of the 12 game schedule, winning 8 games isn’t as big a deal anymore. Winning 9 isn’t as big a deal anymore. Once upon a time winning 10 games meant you’d had a historic season – but that’s because back then it meant you had only lost one game! These coaches and ADs want to stay at 8 games because they know the guarantee game gets them closer to bowl eligibility or it gets them closer to a performance bonus, or it just gets them closer to a record that they can pretend is progress when they’re on the rubber chicken offseason talking circuit. Fans need to wake up and realize that going 6-6 when 3 of those are against the hapless doesn’t matter. And once they start putting the screws to coaches who haven’t won anything they can actually be proud of, then we can get our 9 game schedule and leave this nonsense behind. I don’t see how Kentucky fans aren’t sick of paying through the nose to go to the stadium 7 times a year and only see three good games. I know I am. And seriously, if these people want to destroy the rivalries that literally BUILT this league into the money making beast it is today just so they can get a few more easy wins? Fuck them.
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1701, the thing is a lot of the schools that seem to be asking for 8 don’t participate in any of those rivalry games that made the league what it is (for instance, the Egg Bowl is fun to watch because of the hate, but it’s not a game that really means anything outside the Magnolia State). They know they have little chance of winning the SEC in football, so bowl eligibility and breaking .500 is success to them.
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But I don’t hear a lot of “we need to do what’s best for the SEC” from those schools – just from us. What’s best for the SEC is for historic and traditional rivalries to be played every year so we get a lot of TV eyeballs. What’s best for the SEC isn’t to have Mississippi State playing Alabama (State). So why aren’t the other schools willing to take their lumps the same way we always have?
Fuck ’em.
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Simple answer; money. The second and third tier SEC programs want that near lock of going to a bowl and their coach wants the easier path to 8 wins. It is hard for a program not named Georgia, Alabama, Auburn, LSU or Florida to justify firing a coach who consistently wins 8 games a season. If a program starts the season with 4 “gimmes”, the coach knows he only has to cobble together a couple wins to go to a bowl and a couple more to claim a season that “wasn’t what we hoped for to start with but I think shows the direction the program is going and things are looking up for the future”.
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Spot on! We play exactly 2 decent home games this season, Auburn and Tennessee. The “donation” and ticket cost for season tickets allows the lucky purchaser to see Samford, Kent State, Vanderbilt and tech in the other four games in Athens.
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We can’t help that Fech decided to sink their entire Power 5 football program by becoming a service academy.
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Hiring that goofball Collins is what sunk their program. He is a complete joke of a coach. I hope they keep him forever.
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Paul Johnson was sending the program in that direction. The 2017 and 2018 beatdowns sent him packing.
Collins has been a terrible hire, but no one wanted the task of rebuilding that roster.
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Three good home games a year is being extremely generous.
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It’s not their fans that think 6-6 matters, man.
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So well said. How in the hell are these people at a place where protecting Kentucky vs. the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers is even on the same menu as preserving 100 year old SEC rivalries ?
Honestly, this shit would be like a breakup point for me. Those 8 game holdouts are damn lucky to be along for the ride. Mississippi State, god love you as an original member, but you are TOTALLY expendable. The Sunbelt and Conference USA are waiting with open arms if you want South Alabama or Southern Miss every year. As Staples alluded to, how does the math even stack up vis-à-vis a 9th game of inventory vs. your shitty bowl game in Ft. Worth or Mobile on December 27th ? It’s so clearly a couple dudes (i.e. coaches / ADs) with bullshit performance bonuses for making shitty bowl games their own fans don’t even give a shit about.
You should have thought about this before your vote to add Texas and OU, but Nooooo, you want to have your cake and eat it too. Josh Brooks and the other ADs need to call this bullshit out. The 1-7 people have nothing but pure individual selfishness.
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It wasn’t logical to expand the SEC beyond 12 teams. South Carolina, Missouri, Arkansas and aTm should not be in the SEC. Texas and Oklahoma certainly have no reason to be in. When the SEC expanded beyond the original 10 teams, the logical additions should have been Clemson and FSU.
When the tv money walked in, logic walked out.
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Logic anyway is based on whatever the goal is to begin with. The goal is not top competition or fan interest…as you say, hasn’t been either of those for a long, long time.
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Money kicked logic out of the room.
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Not mentioned – the Barn. Behind the scenes, it would not surprise me if they support the 1-7 model.
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This^^^^
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I guarantee their fan base doesn’t support it.
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I know many that do…lots Barners in the Newnan and west/southwest area from there are tired of the way the series has turned.
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Bitches. Don’t even deserve to be barked at.
…maybe the grandmothers, but definitely not the kids.
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I’ve said it before, but if there’s an old school program that would quietly support the 1+7 model, it’s Tennessee. Losing UGA and ‘Bama as annual games while keeping Vandy as the permanent opponent would be about as good as it gets for the Vols.
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Fact.
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One thing I’ve been thinking about that could be surprisingly palatable on some fronts: Trade Tennessee to Florida as a permanent and LSU to Alabama (i.e. end alabama-tennessee annually). I don’t think Alabama-Tennessee is nearly as untouchable as Auburn-Georgia, but my bias is probably showing. Most Tennessee fans would probably welcome it, and the modern nod would love preserving LSU-Alabama permanently.
This is of course assuming you had LSU-Florida as a pair in the 3 permanent format, which was by no means a given, but made sense as Florida’s 2nd “top team” with history and relative geography. LSU is obviously a flex-team that can go pair with many teams, but Florida is geographically isolated if you consider putting them with OU something asinine.
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I wish the powers that be would listen to the fans. We’re tired of seeing games with Samford, Charleston Southern, and other such numb nuts. Give us 9 SEC games!
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If it’s gonna stay at 8 conference games why not just do a 3-5 schedule? 1-7 is ridiculous because it would eliminate several huge rivalry games. 3-5 will keep the big rivalries and you’d still cycle through the the entire league in 3 years (and cycle through all but two teams every two years)
I guess my biggest issue is why if we stay at 8 games it has to be 1-7. 3-5 makes so much more sense to me.
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Or 2-6?
There are several teams that have 2 natural historic rivalry games that must be preserved. There are zero teams with 3.
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Anything is better than 1-7.,
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100 percent agree here. Going to 16 teams is stupid, except from a tv money standpoint. The marginal return to scale in going to 16, save for tv money, is in the negatives. But it seems that argument was lost a long time ago. Going to 14 was really stupid, save for the tv money, but at least somewhat manageable.
I really dont give a damn that we’ve not been to College Station. And while I agree about the endless cupcakes, it seemed that a couple of years ago, a conscious decision was made to schedule OOC games that people actually want to see. I’m not afraid of playing Texas, or OU. But I dont want to vaporize a big chunk of the tradtion of the SEC just to get them on the schedule more often.
8 conference games is fine with me. Lurking in the background is the 12 team playoff (money again, as it’s stupid from a competitive standpoint). If they torch things, it wont amaze me if the conference championship games go as part of an expanded playoff. And why would anyone outside the SEC care? The SECC is really the only one that has mattered the last 30 years. Everyone else added one as an attempt to recreate the SECC, and none of them have come close. Of couse other conferences would be happy to blow up one more thing that is special about the SEC, and thus puts the rest of them at a disadvantage.
I dont care how much tv money there is. There is plenty to go around now. People care about CFB because of their emotional attachment to the traditions. Blow up the traditions, and what do you have left? I expect media guys like Staples to shill endlessly for their foregone conclusion that WE NEED 9 GAMES. WE NEED EXPANDED PLAYOFFS. Of course they do. They make a living covering all this, why wouldnt they want more of it?
It’s not the NFL. There is no way to enforce “parity” via talent acquisition, conference income draws, NIL even. It is what it is. The only way to do all that is to add another layer of bureaucracy oversight/control, and who wants that? The tv money is so high because the fans care so much. If you take away the reasons they care, guess what happens next? Markets dont always only ever go up. The soulless suits at Disney and elsewhere would be well advised to keep that in mind.
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I really like going to away games, but I don’t give a damn about going to College Station either. I guess if you are a media guy with an expense account burning a hole in your pocket, going to new locales is worth whining and beating the drum about…..
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I don’t know why, but the more time passes, the more I’m convinced the conference is going to chicken out of going to a nine-game schedule. That’d be disappointing, but I can live with it.
But going to a 1–7 would be unacceptable, particularly when your 3–5 solution is sitting right there. Losing out on annual installments of UGA–Auburn, Bama–LSU, and Bama–Tennessee (to name just a few), all so we could swipe a bunch of Big XII teams? Not even remotely worth it to me as a fan. But I know my approval doesn’t mean diddle when there’s millions of dollars being kicked around.
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How do you rotate 12 opponents through 5 available slots for all 16 moving parts (the teams) ? That math is a nightmare if not impossible to do in any way that makes sense.
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I may be missing something but it doesn’t seem too tricky.
You take away your 3 permanents obviously and then line up the 12 teams you have left to play in order. Hit five a year. So if Georgia had Florida, Auburn, and South Carolina we’d have these twelve left:
Arkansas, Mizzou, Alabama, Kentucky, Ole Miss, Tennessee, LSU, A&M, Miss. State, Oklahoma, Vandy, Texas
Play 1-5 year one, play 6-10 year two, play 11,12 and 1-3 year three, play 4-8 year four, etc.
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but think about trying to balance number of home games in any one season vs who is due to play where as they cycle through completely unique slates of rotators.
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Don’t worry. In this format we still get to play at least two home games vs a FCS and a Sunbelt team!
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Getting unstuck from Vandy & Auburn is finally a relief. Looking forward to going to finallt going Kyle field and dumping on Jimbos home turf. Please sign me up for a Charmin NIL deal right now.
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Supper was great until those new kids from Oklahoma and Texas showed up and ate the dessert while we were all eating steak.
They fucked up Sunday supper for everybody.
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Roy Kramer had the foresight to see that a championship game would make the conference stronger in spite of coaches and ADs at the time crying that it would make it too hard for the SEC to win a national championship with the extra game. He also expanded the number of conference games to eight across the board, where it was previously up to the schools to schedule conference games themselves, and I believe that you could have as few as five conference games. He also made sure to preserve cross-division rivalries which has paid off in spades, in my opinion, but undoubtedly prevented the sort of drift that the Big12 saw when it dropped Nebraska v. Oklahoma.
The conference’s willingness in the early 90s to create the gauntlet that the SEC schedule currently is created the SECs boom as much as anything. These recent decisions to make things “easier” in regard to the post season don’t bode well for the future.
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It follows the “dumb down”, “everybody gets a trophy”, “positive self esteem” trend society has taken over the past 30 or so years. Make things easy to accomplish and then give awards for accomplishing something easy.
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You’re right. It’s not just about bowl eligibility. It’s about coaches getting fired for not making bowl eligibility. Completely different, amirite?
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When they say 3-6 model, does that imply doing away with divisions? With 16 teams, that would be seven division games . . .
Hey, that’s why I make the big bucks. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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Divisions are dead.
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Gosh, isn’t it great that Mississippi State, Arkansas and Kentucky are so concerned about whether Georgia, Alabama and LSU get left out of the CFP.
I will bet Saban and Smart are not worried about that.
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It’s gonna be 1 + 7. I don’t think 9 conference games had the traction some think it did. That makes it harder for the SEC to get into the CFB which is what it’s all about at the end of the day.
But, hey, at least they aren’t calling it pods so I’m good with that part.
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If we want Georgia-Auburn to continue as an annual game, we need to be letting those in power know our thoughts.
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Well I agree with you. I’d like to keep it as well but unless they do a 2 + 6, I don’t see it happening. I really think 8 is the sticking point.
We will see. I’ve been wrong many times before.
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I agree and don’t care about 8 vs. 9 as long as Auburn and Florida stay on our schedule.
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Unless AU wants to keep it too, I think it’s a goner. Until TX and OU come in and we go to 9 SEC Games.
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There is no reason to change anything including division play until Oklahoma and Texas join the conference.
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1-7
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Bowl eligibility? talk about living in the past. Bowl Eligibility doesn’t matter much now and won’t matter at all in 2025.
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It matters to ESPN and that is what is most important.
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5 win teams have been going to bowls for a while now.
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I am interested in this discussion, and I like the 9-game, 3-6 model the most compelling. However, I figure whatever they decide will only last 4-6 years until college football moves to something a 60-team super pro-league model (with four 15-team divisions) anyway. So it’s all kind of a moot point.
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Until there’s an antitrust exemption for that super league, I don’t see this happening.
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+1 for the Dylan Thomas, and by proxy “Back to School” / Rodney Dangerfield reference:
“Meanwhile, Andy Staples ($$) rages against the dying of the light.”
Bravo!
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Its got a good beat and you can dance to it
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The Mouse will weigh-in. 3-6 is better for TV unless they can broker more cross conference matchups which is even better for them. Maybe we get more Clemson in the 1-7 model?
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Any discussion on those white helmets that were posted yesterday? Please, Dawg, no!
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Recruits love it…and to possibly sell some white helmets..that was a recent commit in the pic I believe.
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If recruits want to post pictures on social media in them playing dress up, fine.
If those things actually ever hit the field, I’ll be pissed.
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Good lord people. When you go to 16 teams you gotta increase games or you’re never going to play each other. Just swing your weight around to make sure the 12 team playoff has enough at large bids, and bowl eligibility starts at 5 wins. Then we can watch a lot more “SEC” football, home games will improve, etc.
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Tell Kentucky and (presumably) South Carolina that nothing is stopping them from dropping Louisville and Clemson in the non-conference if they need another cupcake.
Better yet, South Carolina, I have the perfect solution. You can have Georgia Tech for Thanksgiving and we’ll take Clemson off your hands. Or we can rotate them. Hell USCjr and Tech did play 13 times between 1970-1991.
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As long as UGA continues scheduling G5 and FCS teams it’s a shit show and it sucks.
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No need to penalize yourself. UGA’s OOC schedule is as strong if not stronger than anyone.
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Most folks look for the easy way. They’re soft.
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We could just schedule Auburn as Non-Conf the 2 years they rotate off and then we’d be fine.
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JFC… if Josh Brooks and Georgia votes for 1-7 and removes Auburn from our schedule every year, I’m done giving money to the Athletic Department.
I don’t NEED to watch games in person, it’s a want. And with inflation, it’s a want that’s more and more difficult to afford.
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If we go 1-7 I’d prefer to keep Auburn over Florida. But I’m sure we’ll end up with the shittier option.
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1-7 means the end of the DSOR as an annual game. That’s a foregone conclusion because no way the suits in Birmingham break up the Iron Bowl.
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I’m aware. That is simply the matchup I would prefer.
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