The 'New SEC': What Will It Look Like With Oklahoma And Texas As Members?
The college football internet was close to being broken on Wednesday when the Houston Chronicle reported that Texas and Oklahoma had reached out to the Southeastern Conference about joining college football's top-ranked conference.
There a multitude moving parts to this potential change, not the least of which is the geographic layout of the league. What would happen to the existing divisions if the two schools were approved for membership?
Realignment would almost certainly be necessary. Due to the physical locations of both Texas and Oklahoma, several schools would have to move. Unlike in 2012 with Texas A&M and Missouri, one team can just be but in the SEC East and SEC West division.
Why? Because the league would be unbalanced. Nine teams would geographically fit in the current spectrum of the SEC West and only seven would be in the SEC East.
At All Aggies, we took it upon ourselves to realign the league, and it would look something like this:
| SEC West Division | SEC East Division |
|---|---|
Texas A&M | Auburn |
Texas | Alabama |
Oklahoma | Florida |
LSU | Georgia |
Missouri | Tennessee |
Arkansas | Vanderbilt |
Ole Miss | Kentucky |
Mississippi State | South Carolina |
This is, of course, the most simple plan for realignment. It could be much more complicated just because of the size of the new league. For all practical purposes, the SEC would really need to be separated into two 'conferences' within the SEC umbrella.
There has been talk of adding a ninth conference game, but if it remains at the current eight, seven of those games would already be spoken for each season, and so it could be years between matchups outside of a team's 'division', and almost a full decade between trips to each campus.
The more likely scenario would be splitting the 16 teams up into four separate pools or divisions.
Of course, that scenario needs to play out. We here at All Aggies elected to play with that as well:
| East Division | North Division | West Division | South Division |
|---|---|---|---|
Florida | Alabama | Texas A&M | LSU |
Georgia | Auburn | Texas | Ole Miss |
Kentucky | Tennessee | Arkansas | Mississippi State |
South Carolina | Vanderbilt | Oklahoma | Missouri |
In this format, a team would play every team within their division every year, and then play two games against each of the other three divisions on a rotating basis.
This is a better situation for the 16 teams because everyone would play everyone else over a two-season span, and everyone would travel to every other stadium in a four-season span.
Then the SEC Championship game would put the teams with the two best records against each other.
The fact that it's come to a point to be considering this scenario is really unprecedented. But the move of Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC is very real as it is sudden.
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