Joe Castiglione: Oklahoma and Texas Involved in 'Fascinating' SEC Schedule Process

The two newest members of the SEC are at the center of things as the conference weighs the decision on how many league games to play every football season.

Oklahoma and Texas now know when they’re headed to the Southeastern Conference, but there are still questions about what exactly the football schedule will look like when they arrive.

One of the next dominoes to fall as the tectonic plates of college football continue to shift will be if the SEC remains with an eight-game conference schedule, or if the league moves to a nine-game slate.

As those talks press on, Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione confirmed the Sooners and the Longhorns have been looped in with their future conference.

“The SEC has invited us to a few meetings where the bulk of the agenda has been all of those elements that have required forward thinking, preplanning, analysis,” Castiglione told Toby Rowland during a radio interview on KREF on Thursday morning. “And it’s been a very, very interesting process. There’s a lot of analytics and study and surveying and really understanding the landscape that we face currently.”

Castiglione laid out a few of the factors the SEC is considering, from ensuring that conference rivalries are protected to the recent news that the College Football Playoff will expand from four participants to 12 in 2024.

“Obviously these talks started before we knew about the College Football Playoff and now that’s arrived,” Castiglione said. “There’s talk around that and then other options that might change scheduling like whether the conference continues to play eight conference games or whether they move to nine.

“Then the development of how you determine permanent opponents, if you will. Certainly natural rivalries define what permanent opponents may be. So it’s really a fascinating type of process.”

Oklahoma and Texas are accustomed to a nine-game conference schedule, as the Big 12 has utilized the round robin model since the league downsized to 10 teams.

Even in 2023 with the addition of the four newcomers — BYU, UCF, Houston and Cincinnati — the Big 12 opted to keep the same number of league contests.

Though he didn’t want to guess as to what the end result would be, Castiglione did indicate there are serious discussions surrounding the possibility of the SEC expanding the conference schedule to nine games.

“I think there’s a lot of conversation around moving to a ninth conference game,” Castiglione said. “But this is a very tedious and important process so I don’t want to speculate as to where it’s going to land. It’ll land where it’s supposed to land to strengthen all the member teams as best they can and give the membership the best chance to have great seasons and pursue a spot in the College Football Playoff.”

Another wrinkle to the future scheduling process is how every sport other than football intends to operate.

Midweek travel is common in other sports like basketball, softball and baseball, and the league is working to strike the right balance for every student-athlete.

“It’s different in some ways anyway from one sport to another because you’re trying to make schedules that build each member of the conference, which strengthens the conference in total,” Castiglione said. “And the Big 12 is going through something very similar. We’ve been involved in those conversations as well.”

One thing is for certain — Oklahoma and Texas will continue their annual battles in the SEC while the entire conference adjusts to the new 16-team league. 

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