I've said before that this was a good solution given the number of teams we have now. It actually manages to bridge more gaps than the old 12-team conference had with 1 cross-division locked-in opponent, which meant each team from one division only played all the other division's teams home/away every 5 years.
And it went about as well for LSU as we could expect. The problem for LSU is that it's nobody's must-play game, except for probably Ole Miss. Lots of teams have an in-state they want to keep, which fills up one one of their slots. LSU isn't that big of a deal to a lot of teams to warrant taking up one of their other 2 slots.
I think LSU fans would generally prefer some rank order of: Ole Miss, Alabama, Auburn, Florida, A&M. We got two of those, though the degree to which that satisfies will depend on which order of those 5 one personally holds. But on the whole, 2 out of that list is pretty good.
At a glance, it seems like we could've gotten one of the Alabama schools, because their third team surely can't mean more to them than LSU does. BUT, of course it's not that simple. Once you replace one of their teams with LSU, you have to adjust the removed team's 3 opponents, and so on and so on. I haven't sat down to see if it could've worked out as well for everybody.
But it would've been nice to keep Bama or Auburn. Just have to enjoy years like these when we get to play both of those bastards.
