re: SEC Realignment Proposal

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I think LSU and Ole Miss should be permanent opponents. I love the LSU-Bama game but LSU-Ole Miss is a real, old rivalry. Can't kill that.

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LSU and Ole Miss would never not play each other.

Would never happen.

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The permanent opponents from other pods should be based off of historical rivalries, but with all teams permanent opponents tiered. LSU having to play Tenn, Bama, and UF every year is ridiculous. Especially when Arkansas is playing Vandy, Ole Miss, and South Carolina. Should be equal across the board, just like the individual pods are. Why have the pods based on equality but the cross-pod permanent opponents be power teams vs power teams and weak teams vs weak teams. Makes no sense...

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You're definitely right that LSU drew a really tough straw on opponents. Honestly, a big part of it was that I didn't want people to be claiming that as an LSU fan, I was going easy on them.

Also, I am a fan of the NFL model where scheduling considers the strength of the teams. I think that taking strength of teams into account when making the rivalries isn't particularly FAIR, but would lead to better games as there would be more competitive games and fewer blowouts.

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Why not pair TAMU and Bama as permanent rivals? There is a bit of a connection there through Bryant

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And coach Fran.

support

Switch Va tech and Nc state to SEC north and UT, UGA to east.

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This is really helpful. I had a tough time ranking rivalries in the East especially. I'm going to make some revisions based upon the feedback from this thread (eventually, not today at work), and I'll definitely take these into account.

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Other old rivalries that kind of got killed by the 1992 additions are

- Auburn vs Florida
- Auburn vs Tennessee
- Alabama vs Vanderbilt (meh)
- Mississippi State vs LSU
- Mississippi State vs Alabama
- Ole Miss vs Vanderbilt
- Tennessee vs Kentucky
- Tennessee vs Vanderbilt
- Georgia vs Vanderbilt

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The fact that Tennessee's 1998 championship makes them a more valuable win than a win over Ole Miss as a tier 4 team makes this absurd. It doesn't matter what your team did 20 years ago. Has no bearing on how good your team is today. Perhaps you should just rank the coaching and recruiting classes and tier them that way...still stupid but makes more sense than these tiers.

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The point of the tiers and on basing them on the whole BSC era was to avoid overweighting recent performance. Instead, I wanted to get a big-picture view of how teams have done over the past 20-ish years. That's short enough that we're not counting really old records, but long enough to work through a couple of cycles of teams getting good and bad again.

So yeah, it's not perfect. Ole Miss is probably a little low, and Tennessee is probably a little high. But at least it's a relatively objective way to measure strength over the past couple of decades. Because just ranking the teams subjectively would be much less accurate, in my opinion.

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This is how I would determine the SEC Championship game:

The years that the SEC East plays the SEC West, the team with best overall record in those 2 divisions goes to ATL.
The years that the SEC North plays the SEC South, the team with the best overall record in those 2 divisions goes to ATL.

Then the next year the same thing:

SEC East plays SEC North, best record goes to ATL.
SEC West plays SEC South, best record goes to ATL.

And so on so forth.

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Hmm I really like this idea. I'm going to eventually revise the presentation to include a championship system, and I was between (1) semi-final "playoff" system, and (2) 2 best total records. But this would be a good way of preserving basically the same system we have now for champion (because all teams in those two pods would play each other, like a temporary division), while getting the schedule benefits of the pod.

I'm definitely adding this idea to consideration. At the least, it might be a good temporary solution that would be slightly less crazy than going to a semi-final championship system.

You've obviously put a lot of time and thought into this. It's interesting, but I cannot imagine anyone agreeing to implement it.