The SEC’s Nine-Game Schedule Is About to Test Its Fans
The playoff implications matter, but the bigger adjustment might come from fanbases learning that 9-3, 7-5 and 5-7 don’t mean quite what they used to.
Conference realignment is the bane of college football. I’ve long held this position, and it’s actually not because I’m salty about Texas and Oklahoma nuking the Big 12 without any sort of remorse whatsoever.
No, the trend of conference realignment began way before those schools decided that chasing the dollar signs was a better deal than keeping the sport happy and healthy in the long run. Just think back over the last 20 years. Texas A&M and Missouri made the same decision that Texas and OU did, bolting to the SEC following the 2011 campaign. The same goes for schools like Rutgers, Maryland, Nebraska and Colorado — all of them decided that sticking in the place they used to be wasn’t good enough. But it goes back way, way further than that. As Bill Connelly exposited in his book Forward Progress, conference shakeups have been a mainstay of college football for almost 100 years.
Now we live in the era of superconferences. Eighteen teams reside in the Big Ten. There are 17 schools in the ACC, several of which don’t subscribe to the whole “Atlantic Coast” part of the conference (I’m looking at you, Cal, Stanford and SMU). There are 16 teams each in both the Big 12 and SEC, too, which means four conferences that were never really designed to house this many sides are now attempting to figure out how to create schedules that are simultaneously fair, entertaining, lucrative and somehow capable of maintaining rivalries that existed long before television executives started deciding who should play whom. It’s a mess, and all these leagues are way too bloated, making scheduling an absolute nightmare for everybody.
Back in the day, a nice, clean round-robin slate was all that was necessary. You played everybody, everybody played you and by the end of the year everybody was pleased (except those who lost, of course). Now, everybody is up in arms about strength of schedule compared to their opposition, wondering why one team got to avoid three of the best programs in the league while another was sent through a meat grinder, none more so than the Southeastern Conference.
For the first time in its modern scheduling era, the SEC will be playing nine conference games in 2026. This catches the league up to the rest of its competitors, as the Big Ten has been playing nine games against itself since 2016, while the Big 12 has done the same since 2012. The ACC is the only outlier of the bunch, as its 17-team mega-league requires it to do some massive maneuvering to make everything equal. It has failed spectacularly at doing so, but that is a conversation for another time because attempting to explain the ACC’s scheduling model would just confuse everybody way too much.
