re: LSU's new permanent East opponent: South Carolina?

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All the other 10 teams will have six division games and two rotating games.

Could this work?

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I'm sure there's a way to do it mathematically, but then other teams would have to wait through a 12-year rotation to play those four, so we'd only get Tennessee and Georgia twice every 12 years instead of twice every seven years, as we would without permanent interdivisional opponents.

A 9 game conference schedule guarantees 7 conference members a loss on their season's record. This could lose the conference million's of dollars in bowl payouts in the end.

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Actually it is not. Perma games where each Big 6 team (the only 6 teams to win the SEC since expansion) has to play at least 1 Big 6 team from the opposite division ensures parity

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It also puts non-annual cross-divisional rivals basically in separate conferences.

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I can only imagine how much LSU fans would bitch about Birmingham if that happened

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I'd be more likely to bitch, as I have done in the past, about never getting to play some of the East teams. I have been a fan of an SEC team from 1971 through today, yet I never got to see my team face Herschel Walker, Bo Jackson or Peyton Manning, three of the best players to come through this conference in a generation. That is directly attributable to the idiotic scheduling formats of the past that had four teams rotating through a single schedule slot in order to preserve traditional rivalries.

Now, they want to switch that to six teams rotating through one slot. You could take your kid to his first LSU football game against Georgia when he's in first grade, then you could take him to the next LSU-Georgia game when he graduates from high school. By the time he witnessed five LSU-Georgia games in Tiger Stadium, he'd be collecting Social Security. Ridiculous.

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Mizzou in the east makes no sense at all

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Mizzou to the SEC makes no sense at all

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I'd prefer that to not playing at all, but that would certainly cheapen the rivalry. It would be one thing if they were in different conferences, but them doing it while being in the same conference makes it seem like a televised practice

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I disagree. For the last 20 years, you haven't been in the same division anyway, so it's not the same as a traditional conference game. The only thing that makes a conference game between rivals more significant is that you're in a race against each other and beating them not only gives you bragging rights but a step up in the race. In different divisions, that's not a factor. You can lose that game and still win your division with an inferior record to the rival, or win it and your opponent can still win its division with a record inferior to yours.

And it's not like playing SEC opponents in designated non-conference games is unprecedented. Alabama and Ole Miss back in the 1970s played each other in at least one game (maybe more) that did not count in SEC standings.

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I've brought the following scenario up before...if the rivalry games are the be all end all and a 9 game conference slate is out of the question...do the following assuming 14 teams:

No divisions

3 permananent opponents (it's up to the schools to hash all that out...some (Bama-UT) will be obvious...the others will have to be worked out.

Rotate 5 and 5 every two years

Top two teams play for the SEC title

You have the rivalry games, the 8 game schedule, and within a 4 year period, you've played every team in the conference...plus you get the true top two teams playing for the conference title, instead of a possible unbeaten team from one division playing a 3 loss team from the other.

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This makes the most logical sense (reason #1 why it will never be done), but might conflict with NCAA rules that only allow a conference championship game if the conference has two divisions playing a round-robin schedule. Of course, we could probably get the NCAA to amend the rule to allow this scenario.

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A 9 game conference schedule guarantees 7 conference members a loss on their season's record. This could lose the conference million's of dollars in bowl payouts in the end.

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Yes, you'd have to win all three of your OOC games, then go 3-6 or better in SEC play to be bowl eligible. We probably would have fewer bowl eligible teams on average than we do now. Of course, the bowls that we'd be unable to fill are the low-end bowls that don't pay out all that much beyond the expenses of the team playing in them, so it wouldn't mean all that much lost revenue. On the other hand, a 9th conference game would produce a lot more attractive matchups for TV, likely increasing those revenues by much more than the bowl payouts we'd lose.

The Pac 10 played a 9-game schedule, and the Big XII is playing one this year, and they both seem to get a strength of schedule boost in the computers for it, so it's doable.

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forget this crap

time for the SEC league office to stop bowing down to Alabama and Auburn

get rid of the permanents entirely and freaking DEAL WITH IT

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lolumad

you'd understand if yall had a rival

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And geez LSU needs to stop b*tching about playing Florida every year. Not sure what part of "each of the Big Six has a perm cross-division rivalry with another of the Big Six" they don't understand. No, it isn't perfect, but these things are balances of lots of competing interests...

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Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but that's pretty easy for Auburn and Alabama fans to say when, in the 19+ years of divisional play, UT and UGa have combined to go 8-31 against UF and won fewer eastern division titles combined than UF has won by itself.