Yesterday we beat you over the head with our continued push for a nine-game SEC football schedule. You know, the kind that appears not to be on the way. At least not now.
Today, we wanted to remind you of our views regarding the SEC’s new basketball scheduling format. Ah, yes, basketball is on the docket for a Destin vote as well.
As you already know, the league will continue to go division-less in hoops just as it did this past season. And with Missouri and Texas A&M joining the conference, the league’s schedule will increase from 16 games to 18 games per season.
There have been recent conversations across the conference that the SEC might choose to preserve just one permanent home-and-home opponent per team under its new format. If that’s anything more than fearmongering, then the SEC is about to botch its hoops schedule as badly as sticking with an eight-game plan for football will botch things on the gridiron.
Back in January, we rolled out what we call our 4-1-8 plan. The goal of our plan was to preserve as many of the SEC’s old rivalries as possible while also creating new, geographically-driven rivalries for the league’s two new members.
You can read the full plan — including which of the SEC’s most-played rivalries would be continued — right here.
The gist of the plan, however, can be summed up easily:
1. Each school would play nine home games and nine road games.
2. Each school would face four permanent rival schools at home and away each year.
3. Each should would play one rotating rival at home and away each year as well (which brings the total number games versus home-and-away opponents to 10).
4. Each school would face the remaining eight league schools once per season (with four of those games at home and four on the road).
Easy. Simple. Grounded in tradition. Why that’s as perfect as a basketball schedule can be.
Which is why we would be shocked if the Southeastern Conference approves such a plan. It makes too much sense. Instead, we expect many traditional rivalries to be scrapped in order for SEC coaches and ADs to guarantee themselves the easiest, creampuffiest schedules possible.
At any rate, with the focus on the SEC’s new football scheduling format sure to get most of the attention at the SEC Meetings in a couple of weeks, we thought it was important to remind folks that basketball is about to get a revamp, too. Here’s hoping the SEC will do a better job on the hoops front than it appears it will on the football front.
