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The SEC Athletic:

HOOVER, Ala. — Before the story broke, before everyone realized the seismic change afoot in the SEC, commissioner Greg Sankey talked with The Athletic at SEC Media Days and spoke informally about future scheduling.

He brought up the 2020 season.

“We had 10 (SEC) games last year,” Sankey said. “But that didn’t motivate anybody to move to 10 games right now.”

OK, so scratch a 10-game league schedule as a possible solution if Texas and Oklahoma come aboard, creating a 16-team SEC. But all other possibilities appear on the table. They have to be when 16 teams are involved. Major college football has only had one other 16-team league in its modern history, and that experiment by the Western Athletic Conference in the late 1990s failed miserably and resulted in a splitting of the conference.

Don’t expect the same mess this time, but there are lessons to be learned.

Even before all this, the SEC was seriously discussing whether to do away with divisions, potentially going to a pod system. They were not seriously considering a nine-game schedule, and it’s not clear whether the addition of Texas and Oklahoma would change that. But whether it’s eight or nine games there are two obvious options for the SEC going forward:

• Two eight-team divisions.

• Ditch divisions and go to pods.

The cleanest, though not flawless, solution is to keep divisions: Texas and Oklahoma are added to the West, shifting Alabama and Auburn to the East, and Missouri — which has more natural rivalries in the West anyway — goes to its rightful destination. The result:

Potential divisions in 16-team SEC:

WEST
LSU
Mississippi State
Ole Miss
Missouri
Arkansas
Oklahoma
Texas
Texas A&M


EAST
Alabama
Auburn
Tennessee
Vanderbilt
Florida
Georgia
Kentucky
South Carolina

The beauty of this is it solves a big hang-up in the SEC’s current scheduling dilemma: Most everyone in the league has wanted to do away with permanent cross-division games, the exceptions being those involved in the two of the biggest ones: Auburn-Georgia and Alabama-Tennessee. Now those would be division games.

The competitive balance also seems fine. The East may seem stronger at the top, but the West has Oklahoma plus two programs that have won national titles this century (LSU and Texas). Maybe that’s not competitive enough for some people — Georgia and Florida can’t love Alabama joining their division — so a more creative division alignment could be attempted. The ACC tried and kept that (Atlantic and Coastal), while the Big Ten tried and scrapped it (Legends and Leaders). That will certainly be discussed, but the West-East solution is most likely … if they keep divisions. And there are problems with doing so.

If the SEC sticks with an eight-game conference schedule, then visits to other league schools would still be relatively rare. You wouldn’t solve the current dilemma, where Georgia has never visited Texas A&M, and Auburn only plays at Florida once a decade, to use two of many examples.

If the SEC goes to nine league games, then it could alleviate that. A player on an East team, if he stays for four years, would be guaranteed to play each West team at least once. But he would still not be guaranteed to visit each West school.

That’s why pods come into play. Something that’s been bandied about — inside and outside the league — for some time and could be even more attractive now, as a way to keep an eight-game conference schedule but also play everyone more regularly.

The idea: Each team has three permanent opponents, maybe four, then rotates the rest of the schedule.

Potential pod alignment in 16-team SEC:

POD A(Traditional rivals)
Florida
Georgia
Kentucky
South Carolina

POD B(Traditional rivals)
Alabama
Auburn
Tennessee
Vanderbilt

POD C(Geography)
LSU
Missouri*
Mississippi State
Ole Miss

POD D(Old SWC)
Arkansas*
Texas A&M
Texas
Oklahoma

*Arkansas and Missouri could be interchanged.

The top two teams would then make the SEC championship. That’s not as clean a way to get there as divisions, because of varying schedules. But it’s not altogether clean now: Remember when Steve Spurrier petitioned the SEC to change its rules because his South Carolina team, which beat Georgia in 2012, still finished a game behind and lost the division race? In the current format, teams that draw Alabama already have a disadvantage over teams that draw Arkansas.

So the pods are a popular idea. And there’s a (somewhat) recent example to draw on.

When the WAC expanded to 16 teams in 1996, adding several Southwest Conference leftovers and other schools, it faced a tall task in putting the puzzle together with teams stretching from Hawaii to Tulsa to Houston. The WAC’s convoluted plan was to split into two eight-team divisions, and within each division were two four-team quadrants based on geography. For scheduling purposes, the divisions would change every two years, pairing two different quads, so everyone would play a home-and-home with each other within six years. The league stayed at eight conference games.

But two years into the experiment, the quad/division system had proven untenable for many members. The WAC planned to vote on permanent divisions in early 1998, scrapping the quads to help with rivalries and travel costs. That created its own problems, as longtime rivals like Colorado State, Wyoming and Air Force faced the potential of being split up and rarely seeing each other. Frustration reached a breaking point, and eight WAC schools opted to break away and form the Mountain West Conference. The WAC had become too big.

“People ask me, why did the WAC fail?” former WAC commissioner Karl Benson said Saturday. “It was the combination of different mission statements from an academic standpoint and more importantly, there wasn’t enough money to satisfy 16 teams.”

Money won’t be a problem in a 16-team SEC.

Money is a major reason it’s on the table. Benson also sees a collection of similar schools in the SEC. Figuring out scheduling will be tough, but it’s easier to get everyone on the same page when the priorities are similar.