Heather Dinich criticizes SEC's 8-game league slate in 2024, reveals why it won't matter for CFP

As a fan of the sport of college football, ESPN reporter Heather Dinich was left disappointed — like so many others — when it was announced that the SEC would go with an eight-game, division-less football schedule for 2024. She also doesn’t think it will be a huge difference, at the end of the day.

The biggest reason to be down on the eight-game format is it protects one rivalry per team, not three. But speaking with Paul Finebaum on Friday, Dinich and SEC Network host suspected the league might stack the 2024 slate with rivalries and then make a decision to go to nine games in 2025 and beyond, as the 2024 schedule model is only a one-year deal, for now.

“My reaction was ‘Boooooo.’ Because nine games, that’s what I want to see. I’m a college football fan. You’ve got two premiere teams coming in, two brand-name programs in Oklahoma and Texas. And it’s just going to be difficult, I think. You want to see more marquee matchups. And so play more of them. And if you’re going to mandate a schedule for another Power 5 conference, I think that’s smart and that’s helpful, but the reality is every conference is imbalanced, right? And so part of the issue here is even when you’re playing another Power 5 conference, you could be playing a bottom tier team from that league, that’s a less desirable matchup from an entertainment, fan perspective. And quite frankly, meaningful matchups,” Dinich said.

Dinich also suspects it won’t matter much because, as Finebaum had noted earlier in their discussion, the SEC has been dominating the College Football Playoff field by playing eight conference games with one non-conference Power 5 opponent required.

When the CFP expands to 12 teams for the 2024 season, there’s no reason to think the SEC playing a relatively diminished conference slate — as compared to, say, the Big Ten — will keep anyone out of the playoff.

“The SEC has figured it out. They’ve mastered how to get into the College Football Playoff. Not once, not twice, but all the time and sometimes with two teams and that could very well happen again this year,” Dinich said.

And because the top half of the SEC isn’t likely to fall off a cliff any time soon, so long as the various teams in the conference are scheduling decent non-conference Power 5 competition — many are long-standing rivalries like Florida–Florida State — the selection committee will respect their efforts.

Like the rest of us, Dinich would have loved to seen nine SEC games a season. But as she noted, the SEC could rest assured knowing that with eight games or nine, they’re still likely to be packing their teams into the College Football Playoff.