What the SEC Realignment Means for College Football
The South Eastern Conference (SEC) is the most prominent and successful conference in college football history. Currently sitting at fourteen teams, this SEC has not expanded since 2010, with the additions of Texas A&M and Missouri.
This July, the college football world was shaken when Texas and Oklahoma announced they were leaving the BIG12 and heading for the SEC. And hey, can you blame ‘em? “It just means more.” To be blunt, the move was a financial decision. Texas and Oklahoma were each respectively making $28 million a year in the Big 12. In the SEC, they would make over $45 million. That’s enough reason to abandon their current Big 12 contract, right? Well, maybe not. Many believe Texas and Oklahoma making the venture to the SEC is a troublesome deal for the schools as there is a long history of college football power houses leaving their conferences and quickly seeing their programs plummet. For example, Nebraska, who left the Big 12 in 2011, has seen their program fall into disarray in recent years. Oklahoma and Texas have absolutely dominated the Big 12 this century. In the 25 year history of the Big 12 championship game, Oklahoma or Texas have appeared in 18 of them and Oklahoma has won six of the last eight Big 12 Titles.
Many college football fans have also voiced their concerns regarding the realignment. Many suggest that realignment would ruin the sport as a whole. Many fans also worry that the expansion of the already-powerful SEC would form a “superconference. A superconference is the term many sports fans use to describe a conference or division involving too many powerhouse teams or programs. The fear that Texas and Oklahoma joining the SEC would essentially eliminate all non-SEC teams from Playoff contention is widely held. The biggest concern with SEC realignment among college football fans is that this move will snowball into more teams moving conferences. Recently, it was reported by ESPN that the SEC had been in “close contact” with schools such as Ohio State, Michigan, Clemson and Florida State. (Though after Florida State’s 2021 season, the SEC may want to reconsider.) Clemson or Ohio State have appeared in all but one Playoff in the Playoff era, accumulating three combined championships. Point being, the addition of those two powerhouses and an upward-trending Michigan team further poses the threat of a superconference. In that situation, any team not in the SEC would be demoted to essentially the same status as a Group of 5 team, making it almost impossible for a non-SEC team to make the Playoff.
Another major concern revolves around rivalries, arguably the most exciting aspect of college football. When Texas and Oklahoma join the SEC, it will shake up the SEC divisions. A commonly proposed idea includes four SEC “pods,” where teams would be grouped into four smaller divisions based on region. This is a complicated decision, as it would raise a multitude of questions. With four pods, how would the two conference title game contenders be decided. Would the SEC teams fall into a Big 12 format, where teams play a rotating schedule with no divisions and the two teams with the best records would play for the title? Traditionally in the SEC, teams have an annual cross-divisional rival in addition to a rotating cross-divisional game. Some of the most storied rivalries in the sport’s history come from those annual rivalries and many fans take issue with the thought of relinquishing those games.
Since the realignment announcement, the ACC, BiG 10 and Pac 12 have formed an alliance, which came across as a defense, resisting the thought that the SEC could completely overtake the sport. As you may have noticed, one non-SEC conference wasn’t included in the tri-conference alliance. That conference is the Big 12, the conference that will likely suffer most from this realignment move. And being left out of the alliance was salt to the wound. The flailing Big 12 then picked itself up and made a grab for four non Power 5 teams: Cincinnati, BYU, Houston and UCF, all of which have been ranked in the Top 10 of the AP poll in the last 5 years. While resorting to Group of 5 teams to try to breathe life into your conference may seem like a disappointing move, the Big 12 may actually benefit from this move immensely. It helps that Cincinnati is currently in the College Football Playoff, competing for a national championship. BYU is a national title winning program and UCF proclaims to have won it all in 2017. The Big 12 may have quietly made one of the smartest moves in college football history.
Regardless of how you feel about change in college football, it is coming. College football is an ever-evolving sport and will continue to grow and change; that is the beauty of it. We can theorize and speculate but at the end of the day, the effects of this move will play out in the coming years. All I can say is, Texas and Oklahoma have opened a door that may not be able to be closed.