I’m for a nine-game SEC football schedule, but not the way being used to get there
No matter how much Mitch Barnhart and like-minded athletic directors try to fight it, a nine-game SEC football schedule is coming. Sooner rather than later.
Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports reported Sunday that SEC and Big Ten athletic directors are meeting Wednesday in New Orleans to discuss expanding the College Football Playoff from 12 to 14 or 16 teams, with multiple automatic qualifiers for each league. That would lay the groundwork for a scheduling agreement between the conferences at the top of the college football food chain.
Beginning in 2026, the SEC and Big Ten would control the CFP format, and the changes would pave the way, according to Dellinger, “for SEC administrators to, finally, make the long-discussed move to play nine regular season conference games and would trigger, perhaps, all four power leagues to overhaul their conference championship weekend.”
I’m for a nine-game SEC schedule over the current eight-game format. It’s a 16-team league. The Big Ten and Big 12 are playing nine-game schedules. The SEC should, too.
The rest of it stinks, however. It stinks of most everything else that stinks in modern-day college athletics. It’s a greedy money grab.
I’m not talking about the players. Put me on the Jay Bilas side of the argument, that college athletes are entitled to their fair market value from whomever and wherever. Just like the coaches.
The administrators are another story. To them, there is never enough money. And there are never enough ways to try and procure that money.
We don’t need a 14-team or 16-team football playoff, just as we don’t need a 76-team NCAA men’s or women’s basketball tournament. The 12-team playoff was fine. (An eight-team playoff would have been fine.) The fact that college football players now have to play as many as 17 games to win a national championship — in an era when the sport’s powers-that-be claim to be all about player safety (wink-wink) — is ludicrous.
It is lucrative, however. The more teams in the playoff, the more games in the playoff format. The more games, the more money the CFP can demand from the television networks. With the advent of streaming, there are more media companies vying for the live programming that college sports provide.
After all, schools need to pay those extravagant salaries of coaches, administrators and facility contractors. All that is in addition to the soon-to-be-required payment to athletes thanks to an antitrust settlement. As for NIL money, the schools are asking boosters and fans to pay for that.
There’s a wealth gap going on here with the SEC and Big Ten exerting their money and power over the rest of the conferences, to the overall detriment of the sport. The remaining leagues all have to acquiesce to the whims of the top two for fear the SEC and Big Ten might break away and hold a championship all to themselves. I have little doubt they’d do that, too.
My other fear is that we are going to continue to see an increasing wealth gap inside fan bases, as well, also to the detriment of the sport. Before last Saturday’s Kentucky-Texas basketball game in Austin, I took a stroll around the upper concourse of the Moody Center and was struck by the number of upscale concession offerings, including a Tito’s Vodka area. Hot dog stands were nowhere to be found.
(I will say I was able to buy a 32-ounce Coke in a souvenir cup for $5. It costs $9 at Rupp.)
To lure more dollars, you need better matchups. A nine-game SEC football schedule would bring a scheduling agreement with the Big Ten that, according to Dellenger, “would pit SEC and Big Ten teams against one another in annual games to be sold as a separate television package.”
Think Kentucky-Illinois, or Kentucky-Michigan State, or the return of Kentucky-Indiana. And, to be clear, I’d rather see those matchups than another round of Kentucky vs. (fill in the blank) of the MAC. It’s the greedy mechanisms that the SEC and Big Ten and college football will use to get there that I can do without.
