Why Kentucky football should root for an ACC-Big 12-SEC super conference in 2020
The University of Kentucky, 2020 conference champion. Has a nice ring to it, yeah?
If the college football season is played as currently scheduled this fall, the odds of that happening are stacked against the Wildcats. Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, Florida and LSU are all in the Southeastern Conference. Four of those teams are on UK’s schedule, and it probably would meet one of the other two (an Alabama rematch, or LSU) in the title game. Even with all the returning talent on this year’s roster, betting that UK would go 5-0 against a slate of top-25 SEC foes would take a considerable amount of confidence, since this century the Cats have only five such wins, total.
But what if Kentucky didn’t have to play any of those teams? That would be the case in one alternative scenario proposed by college football writer Barrett Sallee in response to reports that the Big Ten has voted to cancel its 2020 fall sports season.
Reports suggested that the Pac-12 will follow suit but that the SEC is encouraging the Atlantic Coast Conference and Big 12 to stick with plans to play in 2020. Sallee’s proposal was that those three conferences form a power pact and divide their team into four pods, each representing a “conference” whose champion would advance to a six-team playoff (his plan called for two at-large teams).
Suffice to say, this is not likely to happen. At all. But for the sake of conversation, here are the eight team whom Sallee grouped into the “East” conference with Kentucky: Duke, Miami, North Carolina, N.C. State, South Carolina, Virginia, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest.
Nit-picking aside — why is Louisville not in this “conference” and instead grouped in a “North” league whose members include Southern stalwarts Clemson and Georgia — that’s a slate against which Kentucky reasonably could come out as a playoff qualifier.
Of the teams listed in Kentucky’s division, only UNC and Virginia Tech were ranked in the coaches’ preseason top 25 released last week. The Wildcats in December defeated one of those teams in the Belk Bowl, for what it’s worth. They also lost to one of the teams — South Carolina — in a road game that wasn’t all that competitive, for what that’s worth, too.
Duke, Georgia Tech and N.C. State did not qualify for the postseason in 2019. Miami lost its final three games of the season to finish 6-7, and Wake Forest lost its last two. If you work from the belief that the SEC, overall, is a tougher conference than the ACC (as many do), and consider that UK itself was knocking on the door of the preseason top 25, it probably would be favored in all of those matchups.
Kentucky’s coaches and players are confident about having a successful 2020 season regardless of who’s on the schedule. If the two biggest road blocks to a potential playoff spot were North Carolina and Virginia Tech — and perhaps South Carolina — it’s hard to think they wouldn’t sign up for that in a heartbeat.
