Last go-round for the SEC East as divisions go away. Steve Spurrier and Mark Richt weigh in
The SEC East race hits the starting block Saturday with Georgia football opening up conference play against South Carolina.
It’s the 32nd season since the league went to two divisions.
Raise a glass and toast those familiar annual matchups because they are going away in 2024 to make way for Texas and Oklahoma in an expanded 16-team setup.
The Gamecocks are shuffling off Georgia’s schedule next year after the schools from bordering states have played every year since 1992 when the SEC grew to 12 teams with Arkansas and South Carolina coming aboard.
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Vanderbilt and Missouri are the other SEC East teams that Georgia won’t see next season, a change most Bulldog fans won’t shed tears over.
“I understand it, it does make sense to try to get your two best teams on the field for a championship game,” former Georgia coach Mark Richt said. “Just like in the NFL, you might have somebody win one of their divisions and not be one of the better teams but they just happen to be in a weak division and they get in.”
Playing in the SEC East has been a path that has served Georgia well for the most part in the last two decades after Florida’s domination in the 1990s under Steve Spurrier. The Gators won the division to advance to the SEC championship game seven times under the visor-wearing Spurrier between 1992-2000. He left after the 2001 season for a short stay in the NFL.
“We went seven and Tennessee went the other three,” Spurrier said this week. “That made the Tennessee-Florida game really important early in the year. It gave you sort of a leg up and then obviously Georgia got a lot better in the 2000s and has been to it a bunch.”
Since 2002, Georgia has won the East and advanced to the championship game 10 times with Florida making the next most appearances at six.
The Bulldogs ended up winning their first SEC title in 20 years after Michael Johnson’s 19-yard touchdown catch on fourth-and-15 clinched the East at Auburn in 2002.
“That was such a monster play and moment for us to get to the championship game,” Richt said. “It catapulted us in position to win the SEC for the first time in a long time. There were a lot of huge plays that season.”
Starting with David Pollack’s strip-sack touchdown at South Carolina.
Georgia is a program now under Kirby Smart that is making a habit of playing on the biggest stages.
It’s gone to the College Football Playoff three times in the last six years and is chasing its third straight national championship.
Smart has won the East in five of his seven seasons but didn’t want to go down memory lane on what winning the division has meant.
“You just worry about every game,” he said. “You know, like, there's times that we have clinched that and it's, like, OK, well, you're going to go to Atlanta.”
Spurrier, who won a national title in 1996 and finished in the top 4 in the AP poll three other years, placed value on winning the East.
“I thought it was neat to have a division title, a championship,” he said. “That’s usually our first goal of our team. Let’s go win the East first and then we’ll worry about the SEC and if there’s a bigger game after that, we’ll go to it next.”
Richt was 52-26 against SEC East opponents and 33-14 against the West.
Smart is 36-5 against the East and 15-8 against the West, including seven matchups in the SEC championship game and national championship game.
The last call for the SEC East and West is a sign of the times.
“I think it’s the cost of progress,” Smart said. “Any time you have progress, sometimes you have changes. People make changes hopefully for the better for the long-term goal of what we’re trying to get to. That’s a change that the leadership thought necessary.”
South Carolina coach Shane Beamer was tight ends coach and special teams coordinator at Georgia in 2017 when the team won the East. He also was on staffs that won the division in 2010 at South Carolina and as a graduate assistant in 2001 at Tennessee.
He’s not a fan of divisions going away.
“I don’t love it,” he said. “I’m an old school guy. Don’t get me started on expansion and realignment and all that stuff. I’ve always loved the division aspect of it, but I do like the fact that everybody’s going to get to play everybody and players in our program will get to visit other schools as well. It is what it is, and we’ll go play who they tell us to play.”
Kentucky coach Mark Stoops, who has been at the school since 2013, has coached in more than 80 SEC games.
“I’ll miss some of the rivalries and some of the games we won’t play each year,” he said. “We’ll have new challenges. It’s a changing environment and we’re all adapting the best we can.”
Spurrier said he doesn’t know if one division is the best way to determine the teams for the championship game.
“It’s still going to come down to scheduling,” he said. “Pepper Rodgers, my former coach at Florida who I worked for at Georgia Tech, used to say most coaches are about as good as their schedule and all the great players they can get. It’s more to it than just ballplayers and scheduling. The scheduling around the South is not always the most fair thing.”
Florida ended the regular season with Bobby Bowden’s powerhouse Florida State program.
“They beat us a few more times than we beat them,” Spurrier said. “I used to sit back and say how come Tennessee doesn’t have to play FSU. How come Alabama doesn’t play FSU. That’s just the way it was.”
Spurrier won the East an eighth and final time at South Carolina in 2010, the Gamecocks only trip to the SEC championship game.
“We did make one there, yeah,” Spurrier said. “It was neat. We got clobbered in the championship game (56-17 to Auburn). We really played poorly.”
Nick Saban has won the SEC West 11 times at Alabama and LSU.
Smart, Richt and Tennessee’s Phillip Fulmer are tied for the secon-most trips to the championship game for SEC East titles behind Spurrier with five.
Richt knew the SEC East down pat after 15 seasons at Georgia.
When he got to Miami, he had to learn the ACC divisions — the Coastal that Miami was in and the Atlantic.
“I constantly as a coach and as an analyst would have to review who was where,” said Richt, who now does TV work for the ACC Network. "I didn’t want to look like a dummy.”
The ACC has scrapped its divisions starting this season with a new scheduling model.
The SEC will there soon enough with one final fall of divisions ahead.
This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Georgia football vs. South Carolina begins final season of SEC East
