SEC will shed divisions, but will play eight-game schedule starting next year
An anxious week of negotiations and planning yielded ultimately very little in the SEC.
Welcome to America, huh?
The league announced Thursday that football will go the way the basketball went a few years back and get rid of its East and West divisions starting in 2024. The member teams will also each play eight-game conference slates, which isn’t a change at all.
That said, like everything else in the United States, the shift to the eight-game schedule is temporary, according to commissioner Greg Sankey.
To the untrained, it seems like the league wanted to move to a nine-game slate but didn’t whip up the votes. Oklahoma and Texas, by the way, are scheduled to join the conference in 2024, as well.
The proposal for the nine-game slate would have featured three permanent opponents and six on a rotational basis. The problem is distributing the three permanent opponents evenly so that none of the teams have a too-easy or too-hard schedule. Well, that’s the fans’ problem, anyway.
For now, it doesn’t matter. The issue will almost certainly be floated again at next year’s meetings, too.
