Greg Sankey: SEC has "Focused Most Recently On a Single-Division Format"

With the additions of Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC, big changes are in store for the football schedule.

Late in the afternoon on Thursday reports surfaced that Texas and Oklahoma had reached an agreement to leave the Big 12 Conference following this year, with both universities now joining the SEC in 2024.

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey joined Cole Cubelic and Greg McElroy of McElroy and Cublic in the Morning on WJOX in Birmingham.

One of the biggest questions regarding the addition of the Sooners and Longhorns centers around what changes the conference will implement in regards to the football schedule. Currently, the SEC has two divisions - East and West - with seven teams in each. Schools play an eight game conference schedule: six games against division foes, one against a permanent cross-divisional rival, and one against another team from the other division that rotates every year.

Sankey explained that the SEC has approached this change with an open mind.

“We engage in “blue-sky thinking”, that’s not a term that originates with me, but take a step back, look at the big picture, forget all of the old encumbrances, and think about ‘Wow, what are all the options in front of us?', and we’ve explored dozens of scheduling models." said Sankey.

“We’ve accomplished kind of the first objective: let’s look at the options available. The second was: let’s rotate our teams through campuses with greater frequency. We saw games last year - Missouri at Auburn, for example - that hadn’t been played since we added Missouri back in 2012. The one that sticks out in most articles is Georgia hasn’t traveled to College Station since Texas A&M’s been a member. That shouldn’t happen. We shouldn’t be going twelve years between campus visits. With the prominence of our universities, the strength of our football programs, the visibility around our teams, we should be rotating our teams through more frequently.”

So, the objective is to have each of the sixteen teams face each other at a much more frequent rate. That almost assuredly eliminates the possibility of a two-division format. Sankey confirmed as much.

“We have focused most recently on a single-division format.”

Converting to a single-division format - or no-division - will present challenges in and of itself. The SEC has a plethora of famous rivalries that the schools and fans won’t want to see changed.

“We’ve been intentional about our ability to have annual rivalries played, or rivalries played every other year. We haven’t arrived at a destination between 8 or 9 games. The number of games will facilitate the number of annual games that take place. We’ve also kind of looked at the bandwidth of balance and fairness, if you will, in a schedule. We’ve worked with athletic directors to define what that means. You’re always going to have variances in a competitive nature in a schedule based on the other teams’ success and your team’s success in that particular season.”

Now that Texas and Oklahoma will be in the SEC by 2024, don’t expect the decisions on scheduling to take a long time. The conference will have to make a decision soon, with ticket sales, TV contracts, and out of conference games all playing a factor.

“The sooner the better, now that we have clarity around the expansion.” said Sankey.

“This doesn’t mean that other format division ideas won’t pop back into the conversation over the next 60 - 90 days, but we’ve worked really hard over the last year and a half to walk through every kind of possibility, and then to figure out the “Whys?” and then the “Whats?” of a potential model.”

You can listen to the full interview here.

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