SEC Football: Did Nick Saban reveal an SEC secret?
By Kevin Miller
The SEC football world will look much different in 2024. The Texas Longhorns and Oklahoma Sooners will be joining the best conference in America to bring the league to 16 teams. With the addition of the two historical powers, lots of things about the Southeastern Conference have to change.
The most obvious major change is the schedule. Adding two new members to the conference means adding two new members to SEC football schedules. Divisions could still work, but it would take so long for non-rival teams from opposite sides of the conference to play against each other.
Naturally then, the SEC scrapped divisions, and the SEC East and SEC West will be things of the past starting next season. Instead, the conference created a custom, one-time, 8-game schedule for the 2024 SEC football season.
The next step for the league’s schedule makers is to come up with a plan for the schedule moving forward. Will league members play 8 SEC football games? Will they play 9? Will they play 8 with a requirement of another Power-5 out-of-conference game? Will the secondary historical rivalries remain intact? How many “permanent” opponents will each team face every season?
With television money at stake, the SEC isn’t showing its hand just yet.
But the league’s coaches might be.
Last week, Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze made a strange comment a few days after losing to the Georgia Bulldogs. He seemed to absentmindedly lament, “I’ll miss playing Georgia every year because I just got to experience it for the first time…so there are some changes coming.” Currently, Auburn and Georgia play every season. Did Freeze know something?
Arguably the greatest coach in college football history, if any coach in the SEC has no fear of repercussion for letting out conference secrets, it’s Nick Saban. His track record of success, large salary, and nearness to retirement give Saban the ability to say whatever he wants, whenever he wants.
During his Thursday night show, Saban was asked about his thoughts on Oklahoma and Texas joining the league. It didn’t take long into his response before he started talking about the schedule.
Saban seemed to reveal the exact scheduling plan when he said, “The way we’re going to do our 7-team, 1-team fixed, you’re going to play everybody every four years, so almost every guy at your school is going to get to play every other team in your conference.”
"“The way we’re going to do our 7-team, 1-team fixed, you’re going to play everybody every four years, so almost every guy at your school is going to get to play every other team in your conference.”"
None of this is official or even close to official, but it sure sounds like Nick Saban is under the impression that the conference will continue to play eight SEC football games per season. In that 8-game model, each team would have one “fixed” or permanent rival and swap out the other 14 teams in the league on a 7-team in, 7-team out rotational basis.
While this creates a fairly simple scheduling model, and every team should be able to play every other team in the conference home and away over a four-year span, plenty of problems would arise in Saban’s scenario.
Some teams in the league (Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Auburn, etc.) have multiple big-time rivalries within the SEC. If each team has just one permanent rival on the schedule, the “secondary” rivalries would not be played every year.
It would be strange for Georgia-Auburn and Tennessee-Alabama to be removed from the schedule. Even games like South Carolina-Georgia and LSU-Alabama have become rivalries over the years, but those games are in jeopardy. Texas wouldn’t get to go back to the Southwest Conference days and play Arkansas every year (assuming the Red River Shootout stays intact).
It just seems wrong.
Nothing is known for sure just yet, but doubting Nick Saban seems like a foolish thing to do. If what the GOAT says is accurate, the SEC football schedule is going to look pretty strange in the not-too-distant future.
Related Story. SEC Football: League reveals 2024 conference schedule. light