South Carolina football: ACC’s move to pod concept could affect Gamecocks

It’s uncertain what the South Carolina football schedule is going to look like in 2020, but a new idea from the ACC might affect which opponents are on the Gamecock slate.

Power Five conferences are pushing hard to have a fall football season in 2020, and with that pushing come new ideas on how to schedule in the safest and most economically advantageous ways. The Big 10 and PAC-12 have already moved to a conference-only slate in an attempt to shorten the season and ensure that conference members compete against opponents that are within relatively close proximities.

Now, the ACC has come up with a format that takes the all-conference competition a step further. First, note that the conference will need to take in Notre Dame to make this happen. It makes sense as the Fighting Irish are already a partial member, and had planned to face six ACC opponents on its original slate. The addition of Notre Dame gives the league 15 teams.

The ACC is proposing the idea of separating the 15 universities into a trio of five-team “pods.” The pods would be assembled based on geographical location, and the members of each group would play home-and-home series with the other four teams, accounting for eight games.

For example, Clemson may be grouped in a pod with, say, Florida State, Miami, Georgia Tech, and Louisville. The Tigers would play each opponent twice, once at home and once on the road, in essentially a round-robin type format. By doing this, teams can cut down on travel costs and avoid having to hop on a plane to visit a conference foe. A $25,000 bus trip from Tallahassee to Clemson is much shorter and less expensive than a $100,000 flight from Tallahassee to Boston. It’s still unknown how the league would decide its champion, but the idea certainly would save athletic departments a great deal of money.

If the ACC were to adopt this new format, how does it affect the Gamecocks?

First, you could see the SEC follow suit by turning to home-and-home competition and an eight-game conference slate. That could mean South Carolina plays Georgia, Tennessee, and Florida twice, and then fills the rest of the schedule with the next closest conference affiliates (choose between Kentucky, Auburn, Alabama, and Vanderbilt). Obviously, the SEC can’t arrange the same “pod” concept as the ACC since they only have 14 members, but we could see proximity becoming the deciding factor on who plays who.

Secondly, you could see the two conferences work together to create some sort of ACC-SEC challenge, which would hopefully bring about the addition of a ninth, and possibly, tenth game to the schedule. That would help preserve the season-ending rivalries between South Carolina and Clemson, Florida and Florida State, Kentucky and Louisville, and Georgia and Georgia Tech, and could give the conferences unique cross-league matchups that the Big 10 and PAC-12 won’t see in a conference-only slate.

This format actually makes a ton of sense if the main goal is to eliminate travel costs. The Gamecocks could scrap games versus Texas A&M and Missouri in favor of closer destinations like Clemson and Georgia Tech. South Carolina’s 2020 lineup might end up looking something like this:

v. Georgia

@Florida

v. Tennessee

@ Kentucky

v. Vanderbilt

@Tennessee

v. Florida

@Georgia

v. Georgia Tech

@ Clemson

The leagues would need to play their conference opponents first in the case of the season being cut short, but this format provides an exciting end to the year. This idea shows that major college football programs are doing everything in their power to compete on the field this fall. The SEC has said that it will make their final decision on the 2020 season at the end of the month, but until then, all we have is speculation.