re: SEC Football Schedule format for 2024 only

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That goal isn't that big of a deal to me. I know there will have to be some adjustments with the two new teams,but I'd much rather play in addition to A&M each year, Alabama,Ole Miss than see Missouri,Kentucky and South Carolina more frequently. There has to be a way to maintain more than one current rivalry and play others more frequently.

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The counter-argument is that you can either:

A) Play everyone in the conference every other year, or

B) Play Mississippi State, Ole Miss, and Arkansas every year but only play Auburn, Alabama, and Florida once every 8 years.

A conference where we only play Auburn and Alabama once every 8 years seems awful to me. And I think it’s unavoidable with 2 divisions. If they go to divisions, they aren’t going to split up Bama/Auburn/Tennessee. Putting those 3 in the east basically solves all of the big rivalry issues. So the west would wind up being LSU, OM, MSU, Arkansas, aTm, Texas, OU, and Mizzou. How many of those annual (as opposed to every other year) games are worth going 7 years without playing Bama or Auburn?

I think 3+6 is better than 1+7, but if we can’t get to a 9 game schedule I’ll take 1+7 over divisions all day. The big problem is that I don’t see Alabama, Georgia, or Auburn going for 1+7 because it means one of their rivalries would be every other year instead of annual.

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For some damn reason, the SEC did away with pods very early in the discussion

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I think they found it difficult to find groupings of 4 teams that would be satisfactory to all teams. The 3 teams LSU wants to play annually are not the same 3 teams Alabama, Ole Miss or A&M would want to play, for example. I think it was also difficult to construct evenly matched pods without creating totally random pairings. Ultimately, it just wasn’t going to get enough support for those reasons even if in a vacuum it was the fairest set up.

LSU beat Bama last year so Nicky worked his magic to get them off Alabama schedule in 2024. Doesn’t like to have LSU, Georgia, Florida on his schedule. Goes out of his way to have Vanderbilt and Kentucky, instead.