THE ATHLETIC: It’s time to fix SEC scheduling, and one solution stands above the rest
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By Andy Staples
Auburn coach Gus Malzahn said something this week that drove home a point Florida coach Dan Mullen made last week.
“This will be my first time to ever go to Florida,” Malzahn said of the Tigers’ visit this Saturday to The Swamp. “I’ve been to every other place in our league but Florida. This will be a first. Looking forward to it. Yeah. That is pretty unique.”
Malzahn didn’t say this to point out anything about the SEC’s conference scheduling format, but Mullen did. He brought it up unprompted last week when discussing Florida’s schedule. “I think we should mix up the league schedule more, to be perfectly honest with you,” Mullen said during his Monday news conference. “If you look over the next six years, I think we play Miami three times, Florida State six times, South Florida three times, Mississippi State once. So who is the SEC team? I think it’s an injustice for the kids. We should mix those games up and play more teams from the West.”
Further driving home Mullen’s point, the Tigers’ source for Swamp intel this week has come from offensive tackle Jack Driscoll. Driscoll is a grad transfer from UMass. He made his first collegiate start at Florida on Sept. 3, 2016. During his time with the Minutemen, Driscoll also played at Mississippi State, South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia. Most of Driscoll’s teammates have played at Mississippi State and Georgia. None has played at South Carolina (last Auburn visit: 2011; next Auburn visit: 2021) or Tennessee (last Auburn visit: 2013; next Auburn visit: 2025). Another fun fact: UMass will play at Auburn twice before Auburn plays at Tennessee. So, to paraphrase Mullen, which is the SEC team?
This shouldn’t be Malzahn’s first trip to Gainesville. Including his year as the offensive coordinator at Arkansas and his three seasons as offensive coordinator at Auburn, this is Malzahn’s 11th season in the SEC. That he hasn’t coached at Florida yet is further proof the SEC’s football scheduling protocol since expanding to 14 schools has run its course. Now it’s time to look for something new.
The SEC has resisted going to nine conference games, which would give teams three interdivisional games each year. Assuming the league kept one fixed interdivisional opponent, that would allow a team to play everyone in the league at least once every three years. But the SEC still doesn’t seem interested in nine conference games. The schools with teams at the top would be fine with nine. Alabama’s Nick Saban has advocated for more conference games for years. The teams with designs on the College Football Playoff know they’ll need to schedule 10 Power 5 games a year from this point forward, so they don’t particularly care where they come from. But the schools that want to schedule their teams for bowl eligibility want to stay at eight, so eight probably will remain the number.
So how does the league correct an injustice like the fact Auburn and Florida, which played an annual game from 1927 to 2002 with only three exceptions (1941, 1943 and 1944), will play Saturday for only the fourth time since 2003? How can it claim Texas A&M and Georgia are in the same conference when Texas A&M joined in 2012 and the Aggies and Bulldogs won’t meet on the football field as conference foes for the first time until Nov. 23?
There is a better way. If the league insists on keeping the eight-game schedule, it is possible to keep longstanding rivalries as annual affairs while freshening up the league’s schedule. To do this, the SEC needs to ditch divisions, declare three permanent rivals for each team and rotate the remaining 10 conference members through the other five spots. This might sound fairly radical, but enough people within the league are fed up with the current state of SEC scheduling that new solutions might actually get considered instead of summarily dismissed.
How would it work? The fine folks at Banner Society presented a plausible method for every Power 5 conference except the Big 12 — which plays a full round robin and doesn’t need it — to schedule this way in a column in August. The Pac-12, which has only 12 members and plays nine conference games, probably doesn’t need it. The Big Ten might not because it plays nine conference games already, but with its divisional imbalance it could gain from the other fringe benefit of this system: a conference title game between the league’s two best teams instead of between the champions of two arbitrarily — or not-so-arbitrarily — selected divisions. The ACC, which just saw North Carolina and Wake Forest play a nonconference game because they were sick of not playing one another despite being 77 miles apart, absolutely could stand to do this.
In the Banner Society plan, Alabama would play Auburn, LSU and Tennessee every year. That makes sense. The Iron Bowl is a no-brainer. Alabama-LSU has been the best series in the conference this century. Alabama-Tennessee is the rivalry that has kept this scheduling system from changing all these years, so by all means, keep playing it. Auburn would get Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi State in this plan. Personally, I’d like to see the Auburn-Florida rivalry reinstated, but the Tigers might balk at having to play Alabama, Georgia and Florida every season. Plus, Auburn and Florida — as well as traditional rivals Auburn and Tennessee — would see one another every two years. Georgia would have to play Florida and Auburn, of course. Florida would have to play Georgia, but the other two could be dealer’s choice. The Gators and LSU seem to be sick of one another despite a fairly entertaining annual game, so both parties probably wouldn’t mind playing every other year. Most people my age would say Florida and Tennessee must play, but the teams only played 21 times before the creation of divisions made them annual opponents. And that rivalry hasn’t been much of one lately. Tennessee has won only once since 2005.
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Not every current annual rivalry would survive a restructured SEC schedule. (Kim Klement / USA Today)
To pull this off, the league would have to get permission from the NCAA to stage a championship game without divisions. This shouldn’t be difficult. The Big 12 already does this, and the rule that required conferences to have at least 12 teams split into divisions to stage a championship arrived at the number 12 in a completely arbitrary way.
In 1986, a Division II league called the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference submitted legislation that would allow a league to stage a championship game outside of the regular season. The PSAC had 14 teams split into two divisions. If the league wanted to play a title game, everyone had to leave the final Saturday of the season open, and 12 teams played one fewer game while the two division champs played for the title. This seemed foolish, so the league sought NCAA approval to allow its teams to play a full season before the championship game. Dick Yoder, then the athletic director at West Chester (Pa.) University, wrote the proposal and submitted it for consideration at the 1987 NCAA Convention.
Yoder found out he’d written the legislation incorrectly, so he had to rewrite it. While he was rewriting it, officials from the 12-team Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association asked if their league could co-sponsor the bill. They only had one request: Could Yoder change the number from 14 to 12? “We were Division II,” Yoder told me for a story I wrote for Sports Illustrated in 2014. “Nobody really cared.”
The legislation passed at the 1987 convention.
The PSAC didn’t end up staging a title game right away. The Division II playoffs expanded in 1988, and the league’s coaches worried about its champion having to play an extra game. So the rule sat unused and mostly unknown until then-SEC commissioner Roy Kramer used it as the driving force to add Arkansas and South Carolina and split the SEC into divisions to stage a championship game beginning in 1992.
That’s a long way of saying there is nothing sacred about that rule. There is nothing sacred about divisions, either. The SEC is lucky that it has never been burned by a conference title game result, but that remains a possibility. What if the 2015 Alabama team had eaten a batch of bad shrimp the night before playing a pretty meh Florida team in Atlanta? The SEC would have missed the College Football Playoff and would have one fewer national champ. Meanwhile, the people who hated the Alabama-LSU rematch in the BCS title game following the 2011 season can gnash their teeth more over this: Had the best two SEC teams made the SEC title game, the rematch would have taken place in Atlanta instead of New Orleans.
Sure, there will be some arguing over who should play whom every year, but arguing is what people in the SEC do best. When the league expanded to 14 schools by adding Texas A&M and Missouri prior to the 2012 season, it created an unwieldy football product that now feels a little like two separate conferences. It’s time to bring the members of the family together more frequently to make it feel like a more cohesive unit.
