On3 Roundtable: Auburn's 'exciting' 2024 schedule shakes up long history with select teams

The 2024 SEC schedules were revealed and Auburn has an exciting slate of games next fall as Texas and Oklahoma join the conference.

Oklahoma actually comes to The Plains next season, setting up an intriguing matchup. It’ll definitely be a change seeing the SEC logo on the Sooners’ uniforms.

AuburnLive’s Justin Hokanson joined J.D. PicKell on the On3 Roundtable to discuss.

“It’s exciting right,” Hokanson said. “You know, to be able to play with one of the newcomers right off the bat and to get them in Jordan-Hare is cool. Whether it would have been Oklahoma or Texas, I don’t think it would have mattered. So, I think that’s just a cool opportunity for Auburn to host Oklahoma in Hugh Freeze’s second season.” 

The rest of the schedule is pretty traditional, especially with the road game against rival Alabama. But it should rotate in the years to come, creating intriguing matchups with divisions going by the wayside.

“The rest of the schedule, you know, you got Alabama and Georgia as you normally do,” Hokanson said. “You’ve got A&M and Arkansas, who you’ve been playing. Really the biggest differences in the ‘24 schedule — now granted, we don’t know past ’24, because it could go to nine games, but just for ‘24 — no LSU for the first time since 1991.

“No Ole Miss for the first time since 1989. And no Mississippi State for the first time since 1954. So those three teams were always a part of the West in the new SEC, but even going back, Auburn played the Mississippi schools a ton. It’s the first time that they won’t play one of those three, since like the 30s.”

The only downside to next year’s schedule is not playing LSU. As Hokanson put it, it became a game that was circled on the calendar for both teams.

“So that’s the biggest difference is not having Ole Miss, Mississippi State, or LSU on the schedule and that LSU game really had grown into a really awesome rivalry since the mid 90s,” Hokanson said. “Really took off in the 2000s with (Tommy) Tubberville and (Nick) Saban and they just had some classics over the years. So, you take that one out, you move Oklahoma in, which is a new one, but Auburn fans, I mean, the new age of college football, they’re not too attached. I mean, they’re attached to Georgia, Alabama.”

As far as which schools Auburn would want more often? That’s easy.

“I think they’d like to see Florida a little bit more, but past that I think they like how it sort of shaped up in that season,” Hokanson said. “Vanderbilt, Kentucky, Missouri the other teams on there, so I think they’re happy.”