The SEC Forum at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Back "in the day", I viewed winning the SEC as The Thing.  Winning some NC was basically out of reach, almost, needing some weird highly improbable sequence of events.  Not really a thing to which I aspired for "my team".

Now, I ponder if missing out on the CG is a "good thing".  Another week to rest up, get healthy, work on things in general, prepare for the playoff.  A win over Tech and the Dawgs get a 3 or 4 seed and bye (which last season was not much of a perk).  On the other hand, it's a plus to get to play in the CG, recruits probably see it, it's on national TV etc.

But you come out dinged up, with a 50% chance of a loss, no mo ...  huh.

Sort of related to this:  the sheer size of conferences now.

I was thinking this morning about how with 16 teams now and no discernible rotation so far, the schedules are more disparate than ever, and without divisions, I greatly struggle to remember who plays who. 

There's always been games I didn't get the chance to watch, but prior to Texas and OU entering the league, I knew Vanderbilt played Kentucky at some point.  I knew Ole Miss played Arkansas at some point.  Etc., etc.  It seems that just knowing about the schedules helped me retain the results better.  So now I'm not even sure if those two example games happened this year, and it exacerbates my failure to remember much about league results.  Granted, I've also mentioned my failure to remember much about LSU's schedule or the results. 

But the point is I think I identified another facet of today's game that detracts another small piece that used to make it more enjoyable.  I don't know who's playing who anymore.  There's more conference games than ever to keep up with, so I'm missing a greater percentage of games, having only the time to watch the same amount as I used to, so I'm aware of less than I used to be.  And I have no general knowledge--such as teams in the East and West who will all play each other--so the landscape of the SEC is that much more dizzying and out of focus for me.

I hope having the three "perma"-rivals will help with that.  I won't be able to keep up with a lot of matches, but at least there will be a small handful of teams tied to other teams that will help me better recall the schedules, and thus remember results.

So let me ask you:  Would you rather have had the SEC's old rotation when OU was in the Big 12 with Nebraska and Colorado?  This would've meant having one cross-division game locked in every year, in OU's case let's assume it would've been Nebraska.  The trade-off for playing Nebraska every year would've been that OU played all the other North teams home and away over a 5 year period instead of a 4 year period. 

Would you have made that tradeoff to keep Nebraska annual?  Or would you prefer what y'all had, with all six cross-division teams rotating on and off the schedule every 4 years? 

Texas, of course, would've been locked into K-State, since that's who UT loved playing so much

Assuming that's correct in theory, the drawback is most non-con. dates are early in the season, and teams like OU and Nebraska probably would prefer to put that game later in the season. 

Most of the biggest rivalry games are delayed until the final weekend, and even UT-OU is played in the middle of the season.  I doubt they'd want to move it any earlier than that, because they want the team to have fully gelled and had some warmup layups to tune up on. 

Novelty games are often played in week 1, i.e., LSU and Clemson this year.  But if LSU and Clemson were big rivals who wanted to play each other every year and actually cared way more about the game, they wouldn't want it to be week 1.  Or even week 2 or 3. 

It has been suggested by posters (that are still posting on this message board), that Oklahoma didn't push too hard to maintain it.  They were in the middle of a bit of a slump and Nebraska was on fire, and the idea of NOT getting clobbered by that Husker freight train every year, might have been appealing to some of the folks in the administration at OU.

As you point out, ultimately if they'd wanted it bad enough, they would have made it happen.  They didn't, and they didn't.

The rest, as they say, is history.