Kingcmo

Prediction:
-the sec expands the “championship” to include a game for third place. It incentivizes finishing top 2 and makes money.
-The new two game “sec championship weekend presented by Dr Pepper” is split east west, probably Atlanta and Dallas.
-The two cities rotate hosting the 1v2 game.

Angry wave

Why are you writing all of this? UGA owns AU football lock, stock and barrel this century. They had a moment in 2010, who cares?

Finishing third in the SEC and missing the conference championship game will be preferable to finishing first or second.
Third place in SEC sits at home on championship weekend, then jumps ahead of the SECCG loser. Then they will most likely host a playoff game against a team outside the top 10, and the max number of games they’ll play is 16.
The winner of the sec championship will face a top 5 team on championship weekend at a neutral site, and they’ll play a max of 16 games.
the loser of the sec championship will play a top 5 team at a neutral site, then probably have to go on the road in the playoffs against a top 5 team, and to win the title they’ll have to play 17 total games.
Thanks to realignment and conference expansion the SEC (and big 10) championship games have been devalued to the point of being a negative. It’s going to be a problem.

I predict this will be a big issue next year. 3rd place in the SEC or Big10 will be preferable to making the conference championship game.
1. By missing the game the 3rd place team will effectively be guaranteed the bye awarded to the winner. A sure fire bye is way better than playing a top 5 team for a chance at a bye.
2. 3rd place will probably still host a home game (partly because the losers of the championship games inevitably will fall back) against a team at the end of the playoff rankings. Very good chance it’s a less difficult game than the conference championship.
3. The loser of the championship game will be unequivocally worse off than 3rd place. Will have had to play an extra game against an elite team and will probably end up on the road in round one against a tougher opponent.

This is correct. I would also assume the stated desire for 'every team to play everyone in the conference' is probably just cover for "ESPN wants more UGA Texas, Bama Oklahoma games and DGAF about regional rivalries". So also about money.

Yeah, don’t see why this is a big deal. Why should teams schedule long trips away out of conference?
No one in the SEC does this regularly. Who cares?

Eh. The problem is that 50 miles away Clemson had the exact same fact pattern, and there they made the call mid year to dump the experienced but limited vet who had taken them to the cusp the year before for the super frosh from north Atlanta... and they won it all that year.

It's not a 'ranking'. It's basically a tool to predict vegas lines, and it's really, really good at it. As a few have noted here, Bama would be favored on a neutral site right now against all but a handful of teams. He explains all of this in the top of the article every week. Bill Connelly has forgotten more about evaluating college football teams than anyone on this board will ever know.

GA tech and Mississippi state were founding members of the SEC and played each other a grand total of zero (0) times before GA tech left the conference. The history of the “conference” has been play your rivals, there was no grand plan to get all the teams to play each other, even when the conference was much smaller and that was far more practical. That didn’t change until 30 years ago with the divisions.
I don’t know why it has to be 7-1 or 6-3. Just agree on total conference games and then lock in some rivalry games, let the rest of the schedule rotate. If Uga has two permanent games but Missouri only has 1 or 3 who GAF. They’ll still all play pretty often.