What will future SEC scheduling look like for the Florida Gators?

The white sand beaches and golf courses are the backdrops for the most powerful conference in college football this week. The SEC will meet in Destin, Fla., for the annual SEC spring meetings with Florida Gators head coaches Billy Napier and Todd Golden in town.

The week is filled with conversations about the future of the conference and will get Texas A&M‘s Jimbo Fisher and Alabama‘s Nick Saban in the same room since their very public spat a few weeks ago.

The biggest ticket item concerning the Gators will be the future scheduling for football. As we all know, the SEC will soon add the Texas Longhorns and Oklahoma Sooners. This will move the SEC from 14 teams to 16 starting in 2025, if not sooner.

Ross Dellenger of Sports Illustrated reported that the league hired a consulting firm. The firm produced more than 30 different formats for a future football scheduling model for the expanded conference.

According to Dellenger’s reporting, all but two of those have been eliminated.

Billy Napier was asked last week, but the first-year head coach wasn’t ready to formulate an opinion on future scheduling.

“I got thousands of problems to solve before I can have an educated opinion. I don’t have enough time in the day to think about all that. We’re just trying to get 11 on the field and get lined up the right way,” Napier said last week. “I respect the question and I feel bad, because typically I would have an educated opinion. But right now, my day is jam-packed with other things.”

Two schedule models for the future

Those two models are a 1-7 format and a 3-6 format. The first model would be an eight-game league schedule like the SEC currently has. The Gators would have one permanent opponent and seven rotation opponents.

The second model would be a nine-game conference schedule. It would give the Gators three permanent yearly opponents and six rotating opponents.

While most believe divisions will be done away with once the league expands, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey isn’t ready to make that change just yet.

“It’s almost a yearlong conversation when we go to 16 (teams) what will divisions look like and what will schedules look like? Those possibilities include no divisions,” Sankey told Yahoo! Finance writer Josh Schafer. “We’re not going to do it in a knee-jerk way. The divisions work really well for us but when we go to 16 that possibility is front and center for the SEC. Unless the sentiment of our league changes greatly, the division format works, and when we go to 16 that would be the time for adjustment.”

Gators traditional rivals

Florida has traditional rivalries with Georgia and Tennessee from the SEC East. It’s hard to imagine a football season where the Gators don’t meet up with both the Dawgs and Vols. Florida will continue its yearly matchup with Florida State. Will Florida’s permanent rivalry with LSU be maintained?

In the 1-7 format it would be impossible to preserve all of Florida’s traditional annual rivals. A decision would need to be made on which one to keep. How do you choose between discontinuing a game with Tennessee or Georgia? Additionally, Florida isn’t the only SEC school with multiple traditional rivalries. Would Alabama fans give up the Iron Bowl against Auburn or the Third Saturday in October against Tennessee?

The much more logical future for the SEC would be adding a game to the conference schedule and moving to the 3-6 format. The biggest issue with a nine-game league schedule, for most, is home-away fairness. With an odd number of games, some teams would have five home conference games in a particular year, while others will only have four. That already happens to Florida with its annual Georgia game being played in Jacksonville. In odd years, Florida only hosts three SEC teams, like in 2021 (Alabama, Tennessee, Vanderbilt).

The value of nine is the strengthening of the conference and the schedule. It helps sell tickets, something every college athletic office is looking to do.

There may not be a decision made by the end of the week in Destin. It won’t be an easy task to figure out which model to go to and then reconfigure schedules for the future. However, that discussion begins in earnest this week.