South Carolina Football: SEC Realignment and Scheduling Speculation

College football is changing. NIL and the transfer portal are entities that fans would not understand even just a decade ago. TV and streaming are constantly changing. Conferences are adding and losing members at rates too fast to keep up with at times (from 1999 to 2012, TCU played in five different conferences). Southern Cal and UCLA are somehow going to be west coast representatives of the Big 10, a historically east coast and midwest league. And the changes are now getting closer to home.

In 2024, the SEC is expanding. Oklahoma and Texas will officially join the conference at that time, but it is still unknown exactly when during the year the two athletic departments will make their way into the premier athletic conference in America. The original agreement had the Big-12 rivals leaving the conference on July 1, 2025. Since then, the two schools have negotiated their release to come a year earlier in 2024. This likely means Oklahoma and Texas will join the SEC before football season in the summer of 2024, but exact dates have not been released officially.

Ross Dellenger from Sports Illustrated has been all over this story, from the known conference expansion to the potential of schedule realignments. On Friday, after an interview with Alabama Head Coach Nick Saban, Dellenger predicted what he thinks the SEC future may look like.

Many believe the SEC will move from an 8-game conference schedule to a 9-game one, and Dellenger agrees. College athletics is governed primarily by dollars and cents, and adding another conference matchup will increase revenue. If the conference keeps an 8-game schedule, a 1+7 (one permanent rival, seven rotating conference games) schedule format would be most likely, but the 9-game move seems all but inevitable as it certainly will put more money in the coffers.

If this is the case, schools that play a tough out-of-conference rival every season will have decisions to make regarding those historical matchups. Florida, Kentucky, and Georgia play an additional Power-5 matchup each season when they play Florida State, Louisville, and Georgia Tech. South Carolina always plays Clemson and often adds a matchup with one of the North Carolina schools (usually North Carolina, NC State, or East Carolina). Adding an additional conference game will make these schedules even more difficult than they already are.

Knowing the SEC is growing from 14 to 16 teams next year, and assuming a move to a 9-game conference schedule, realignment is needed. One of the most popular ideas for this has been a 3+6 schedule. What this means, essentially, is that each team will have three permanent opponents that they play each season, and the remaining 12 teams in the league will be placed on the schedule in alternating seasons.

This means that instead of the current divisional setup where teams play the 6+1+1 (six divisional opponents, one permanent cross-divisional opponent, and one rotating game against the other six teams in the conference), South Carolina and the rest of the teams in the SEC will have three “rivals” and six rotating opponents. Based on conversations with SEC insiders, Dellenger and his colleagues at SI.com believe this to be the future of the league and have put together their “best educated guess” as to what these rivalries will look like.

https://twitter.com/RossDellenger/status/1631723095667998725?s=20

In Dellenger’s model, South Carolina will be matched up with Tennessee, Florida, and Kentucky. It is somewhat surprising to see Georgia left off of South Carolina’s rival list, Florida not playing against LSU, and Arkansas not being partnered with either LSU or Texas A&M, but Dellenger projects this based on league sources’ views on factors such as fairness, geography, and rivalries.

If Dellenger’s model is accurate, in 2024, South Carolina would play Tennessee, Florida, and Kentucky, and they would play six other conference opponents. In 2025, they would again play the Vols, Gators, and Wild Cats, and they would play the remaining six SEC teams. In 2026, the Gamecocks would play UT, UF, and UK and then the same schools from 2024, just in a different venue; if they played Georgia at home in Columbia in 2024, the 2026 matchup would be in Athens, etc. 2027 would see the three rivalry games continue, and the same matchups from 2025 would be played again, flip-flopping home and away.

Nothing about this is official as Dellenger points out. No one knows yet exactly what will happen. However, college football fans do know one thing: the times, they are a-changing.