re: Old sec scheduling policies.

I miss the Ole Miss / UT games. We have more of a rivalry with them than Auburn. That was lost when we went to these divisions.

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Alabama and Tennessee played every year, which meant the two best programs in the conference had a "scheduling disadvantage" that we didn't whine about.

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Pre-internet days - - - if anyone whined no one heard it.

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Alabama and Tennessee played every year, which meant the two best programs in the conference had a "scheduling disadvantage" that we didn't whine about. But that was the good old days.

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We are going to be getting back there very soon...I hope Bama stays really good personally so we can at least have a good few years where both programs are on top of the conference together.

2015-2020 games could be some of the best in series history.

Yes, they played Ole Miss every year under the old rotation. In fact, in 1986 UT knocked OM out of representing the SEC as champions in the Sugar Bowl. The 1990 games was a "defacto" SEC Championship Game with UT winning 22-13 in Memphis.

In the 50's-80's seems like we always played:
Ole Miss, MSU, Alabama, and Florida every year.
We played Auburn in '69-'72, '80/'81, and '88 -on. We played Kentucky more than Tennessee and Georgia in the 60's-80's....


In the 50s and 60s LSU played The U. many times.

In the 60's and 70's we played A&M almost every year - and it was always in Baton Rouge. Not sure why, and also Ga.Tech.
In fact in late 60s/early 70s we played 3 old SWC schools almost every year - Texas A&M, Rice, and Baylor.

LSU also played many attractive OOC games:
Oregon in 70s, USC in '79 and '84, Colorado in early and late 70s/early 80s, Nebraska in '75/'76, Indiana in '77/'78, Notre Dame in '70/'71, '81,'84-'86, and '97/'98, Ohio State in '87/'88, Wisconsin in '71/'72, Oregon State in '82, Wake Forest in early 70s, Florida State in '79-'83, and'90/'92, K-State in '80,

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As someone who has never known a world without an SEC with divisions I always wondered what scheduling was like before then.

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It went through multiple formats over the years.

From about 1988 until expansion in 1992, there were seven games. You played five perennial opponents, and the other four rotated through the other two spots, so you played everybody at least twice every four years. This was great.

Before that, from sometime in the 1970s until 1987, there were six games. You played five perennial opponents and the other four rotated through the other spot, so you played everybody at least twice every eight years. This sucked, but not as bad as the current system where six teams rotate through one spot.

Before that, it was pretty random. SEC teams simply scheduled whoever they wanted. Teams went decades without playing each other (LSU and Georgia didn't meet a single time from 1953 through 1977, for example). Teams also didn't play the same number of games. Some teams played as many as seven SEC games, others might play as few as five. One year, I believe in the late 1960s, LSU actually only played four SEC teams, and a game against TCU actually counted as an SEC game for us just to get us to five. In some years, the difference in the number of games two teams played made the difference in who won the SEC title (e.g. 6-1 record vs. 5-1).

It was a mess for most of the history of the conference. Finally, in 1988, they got it right, but then they screwed it up four years later with the first expansion. Again in 2002, when they went to only one permanent inter-divisional opponent and two rotating ones (so you played everyone at least twice every five years), they got it back to about as good as it could be with divisions, then screwed that up again ten years later with another expansion.

doppel

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Edit: Do NOT use Wiki for this btw, use the media guide

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The people who do wiki are more up on SEC records than they are ACC records. I wouldn't recommend using wiki for anything but the most commonplace information.