quote:
A 9 game schedule is better all around but it was shot down for two reasons

1. Saban was for it, and the haters are so blindly anti-Saban they didn't want to support a good idea just because he was vocal about it.

2. The scrub teams are worried it will be harder to get to 6 wins and sneak into the Weedeater bowl playing an extra conference game.

3. Schools that have a regular non-conference opponent they play away every other year would get screwed out of a home game every other year, adding up to millions of dollars in direct revenue and many more millions in economic impact to their towns.

South Carolina - Clemson
Florida - Florida State
Georgia - Georgia Tech

These teams already have an additional quality opponent scheduled, and a history of playing that rival that predates the existence of the SEC and Slive's entire life by decades.

From the perspective of an SEC team like, say, LSU, your rival (s) are all included in your conference play, so your OOC schedule can be 5 rent-a-wins at home. From your perspective, it's completely reasonable to schedule only 4 rent-a-win home games and add another quality conference game.

What that LSU (or Bama) fan doesn't realize is that Carolina, Georgia, and Florida already do this with traditional out of conference rivals, so your proposed schedule change only leaves them with 3 potential rent-a-wins at home. Then you have schools like Georgia and Florida who go the extra step and schedule Clemson and Miami out of conference, leaving them with only 2 potential rent-a-wins at home, to LSU/Bama's 4.

The compromise was that everyone now has to schedule a game against a Big 5 conference opponent.

Florida, UGA, Carolina already have this built into their schedules.

Everyone else now has to step up their schedules.

Finally, UGA's AD told Slive straight up that if we are forced into a 9 game schedule that we'd leave the SEC.

That's no BS.

This post was edited on 8/16/14 at 3:12 pm