Greg Sankey sets Goal for New SEC Schedule with Texas, Oklahoma

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You could hear the buzz around the cold room at the Wynfrey Hotel in Hoover back in 2021. The Houston Chronicle reported Texas and Oklahoma would join the SEC, overshadowing Adam Luckett’s show-stopping encounter with Nick Saban. The excitement from the news quickly followed with the question, “When are they getting here?” We finally have a set day, July 1, 2024.

The new-look 16-member SEC will kick off just in time for the expanded 12-team CFB Playoff. We know how this is happening a year earlier than expected (by paying a bunch of money to the Big 12), but what exactly will it look like?

Greg Sankey does not have the answer to that question yet, but he has set a loose deadline. On McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning the Commissioner said the SEC Spring Meetings in Destin are a “far end date” to determine a new scheduling model. “The sooner the better.” The annual meetings are held each year at the end of May or first of June.

A new SEC scheduling model was the center of debate at last year’s SEC Spring Meetings. A nine-game model that featured three annual rivals entered as the heavy favorite, but Mitch Barnhart turned away that momentum by lobbying to stay at eight SEC games per year, with only one annual rivalry game on the slate.

Objectives in New SEC Schedule

When selecting a new scheduling model, Sankey set out with two primary goals. One, explore every option. No idea is a bad idea. The second is an idea everyone can get behind.

“Let’s rotate our teams through campuses with greater frequency,” Sankey said. “We saw games last year, Missouri at Auburn for example, that hadn’t been played since we added Missouri back in 2012. The one that sticks out in most articles is Georgia’s not traveled to College Station since Texas A&M’s been a member. That shouldn’t happen. We shouldn’t be going 12 years between campus visits with the prominence of our universities. The strength of our football programs, the visibility around our teams, we should be rotating our teams more frequently.”

It’s also abundantly clear there will no longer be an SEC West or an SEC East. Divisions are dead. Sankey and others have worked to identify tiebreakers and the clearest path toward an equitable schedule.

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“We’ve been intentional about discussing our ability to have annual rivalries played, or rivalries played every other year. We haven’t arrived at a destination between eight or nine games. The number of games will facilitate the number of annual games that take place. We also have looked at kind of the bandwidth of balance and fairness if you will, in a schedule. We’ve worked with athletic directors to define what that means. You’re always going to have variances with the competitive nature of the schedule based on the other team’s success and your team’s success in that particular season. Those are guiding principles.”

No matter which format is selected or who teams are paired with annually, each team will be traveling to every SEC campus at least once in a four-year span in the new model.

What a New Schedule May Look Like for Kentucky

Well, well, well. Here we are again. A new pod scheduling format is an offseason topic that’s been revisited time and time again over the years. Once folks learned exactly when Texas and Oklahoma will arrive, they got out their scheduling machine to create takes.

This is a good time to remind you that most people who cover the SEC don’t give a damn about Kentucky. When compiling their potential new schedules, the Cats’ preferences do not matter. I’ve seen UK paired with Missouri and the two Mississippi schools. I’ve also seen them linked with South Carolina and the Mississippi schools. It’s difficult to pick the perfect formula for every team, but our friend Adam Luckett is as close as it gets.