Image Courtesy: CBS Sports
Will SEC football ever join the Big 12 and Big Ten at nine conference games? Following the 2025-2026 season, the SEC will have to make that decision. Remaining with an eight game conference slate, the SEC set up the 2024 and 2025 football schedules with each conference member playing either new member, Oklahoma or Texas, home and away over the next two seasons. When the 2024 schedule was announced last December, SEC fans hoped to play conference opponents it had not played over the last few seasons in the fall of 2025. In March, the SEC announced that the 2025 football opponents for each member would be the same as they were in 2024, with the home games flipped to away games and the away games flipped with home games. With the SEC’s decision, we will see essentially the same exact conference schedule in 2024 and 2025. In 2026, the SEC and the Disney TV people have to agree on what the best for the future will be. With a nine game conference slate, every SEC team will play every other conference opponent home and away over each player’s four year college career. Coaches may not like this because it will take away important nonconference games (or games against FCS opponents). But, conference match ups need to become even more important than they already are with the NIL, the transfer portal, and realignment becoming more important by the second. So, it will be up to Disney and the SEC, but the SEC needs to move to a nine game conference schedule. Earlier in July, many SEC teams began cancelling multi-year out of conference series including Georgia-UCLA (2025 & 2026), California-Florida (2026 & 2027), and Auburn-UCLA (2027 & 2028). Those teams cancelling games allows the league will move to a nine game conference schedule in the fall of 2026 and beyond.
With Texas entering the SEC, their Thanksgiving weekend rivalry with Texas A&M will be renewed. The league also kept Oklahoma-Texas (“Red River Rivalry”) at its traditional second weekend of October slot in Dallas at the Cotton Bowl. But, without Oklahoma State in the SEC, the league needed to find a replacement for Oklahoma’s “Bedlam” game. Because Texas A&M will now face Texas annually the last weekend of the regular season annually, during the Sooners’ transitional years into the SEC, they will face LSU, who was left behind by the Aggies. But, if the league does not keep as the Sooners and the Tigers as an annual match up, things will have to be shifted. If the SEC goes to a nine game conference schedule like I discussed in the previous paragraph, LSU’s permanent foes in a nine game conference schedule will likely be Alabama, Ole Miss, and Texas A&M while Oklahoma’s three will likely be Missouri, Texas, and Texas A&M. So, the Arkansas-LSU (“The Battle For the Golden Boot”) and Missouri-Oklahoma match ups may be forced into Thanksgiving weekend the two years when the Sooners and Tigers are not scheduled to play during the four year period.
