Missouri has set up a home-and-home football series with Arkansas State that will see the Red Wolves travel to Columbia in the fall.  The Tigers will reciprocate the 2013 game with a trip to Jonesboro in 2015, an usual move for a Southeastern Conference team.

Arkansas State went 10-3 this past season and launched Gus Malzahn into the Auburn head coaching job.

Mizzou’s 2013 non-conference slate features Murray State, Toledo, Indiana (on the road), and Arkansas State.

Over the past month, we’ve had a few folks ask us about our SEC Commitment Comparators.  “How do some SEC teams have more than 25 commitments when there’s a 25-man cap on signees?”  Well, since the day the SEC implemented its new cap on football signees we at MrSEC.com have referred to it as a “soft” cap.  That’s because it’s not quite the hard and fast rule the league made it out to be.

When league presidents voted in the new regulation in 2011 — ignoring a unanimous “don’t do it” vote from their own football coaches — they did not snuff out the practice of back-counting early enrollees.  And back-counting allows schools to count this year’s signees against the previous year’s class.

The NCAA allows each school to provide 85 scholarships to football players.  Each school can award 25 new scholarships per year.  There’s obviously some natural attrition built into that formula because 25 scholarships over four years would equal 100 scholarships total.

For the sake of example let’s take School X and assume their program has 85 scholarship players at the end of a season.  Now let’s say that 20 players exhaust their eligibility or leave after graduating.  School X would then have 65 players on scholarship heading into signing day.  But in January, School X loses five juniors who depart early for the NFL.  That drops the school’s number of total returning scholarship players to 60.

To max out at the NCAA-mandated 85 scholarships, School X should only be able to sign 25 new athletes on signing day, which is the supposed max anyway.  But.  If School X signed just 20 players the previous year it can still back-count five of this year’s signees against last year’s tally if those extra signees enroll early.  (On the positive side, this does reward student-athletes who have the grades to graduate high school/prep school/junior college early and enroll at School X at mid-year.)

So, let’s say School X signs 30 players this February instead of the 25 allowed by the SEC’s “soft” cap.  Five of those players — if they enroll early  — can be counted toward the 2012 number instead of the 2013 number.

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With the SEC off to a 3-3 start this postseason, we thought it might be time for a little refresher course on the league’s past bowl success.  It seems the SEC’s reputation has been so enhanced in recent years that any bowl loss by a league member is seen as proof that Mike Slive’s conference really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  And if you have to go undefeated each and every bowl season just to get props, well, that’s a pretty tough standard to meet.

In reality, the SEC since 2000 has won right at 60% of its bowl games.  Considering the fact that league teams usually face bowl foes who finished higher in their own conference’s standings, that’s a pretty darn good record.  (Examples: When the SEC sends its eighth or ninth pick to the Liberty Bowl, it faces the champion from Conference USA.  The Chick-fil-A Bowl matches the second pick from the ACC with the fifth pick from the SEC.  And so on.)

Last season the Southeastern Conference finished the postseason 6-3.  Pretty strong.  But in 2010-11 the SEC went 5-5.  So a 3-3 start isn’t anything to cry about.

The league has made its name by winning six consecutive BCS Championship Games and Alabama will have a shot to win #7 on Monday against Notre Dame.  In addition, the SEC has gone 14-6 in BCS games since the 2000 season (including last night’s loss by Florida).  Only the Pac-12 has bested the SEC’s BCS winning percentage (70.5% to 70.0%) over that span.  And remember, one of the SEC’s losses in that period came in last year’s Alabama/LSU BCS title game.  In other words, the Southeastern Conference is responsible for one of its own defeats.

But for those who want an idea of how well the conferences stack up against one another, below is a breakdown of each league’s bowl success and BCS success from 2000 through today.  To the right, we’ve also listed this season’s bowl results to date:

There are five bowl games remaining this season:

Tostitos Fiesta:  Kansas State (Big XII) vs Oregon (Pac-12)

AT&T Cotton:  Oklahoma (Big XII) vs Texas A&M (SEC)

BBVA Compass:  Pittsburgh (Big East) vs Ole Miss (SEC)

GoDaddy.com:  Arkansas State (Sun Belt) vs Kent State (MAC)

Discover BCS Championship Game:  Alabama (SEC) vs Notre Dame (Independent)

Christmas 2012 came and went without Santa delivering any new schools to new conferences.  But with talk growing that Boise State might just stay put in the MWC rather than jump to the Big East as it had planned, the expansion/realignment conversation continues.

For the past couple of weeks we’ve been looking at what we believe to be the final countdown to a Big Bang.  The kind of Big Bang that leaves us with just four or five power conferences playing in their own super-division at the top of the current Football Bowl Subdivision.  The schools making up those leagues and that super-division will be the ones best able to provide full-cost-of-tuition scholarships for their athletes (or at least for their football players).

How this will all work out is anyone’s guess, but we don’t foresee a nice, neat, orderly endgame.  Look at the college landscape today.  Do the conferences all have an equal number of schools?  Do all leagues have the same type of divisional breakdowns or scheduling plans?  The answer, of course, is no and we don’t see why separate business entities all trying to grab as much cash as possible will someday agree that there should be four leagues of 16 teams each just because that’s what many fans want.

There’s an idea that each league — in such a four-league, 16-team scenario — could put two or four teams into a playoff and then we’d all have a mini-NFL to watch each December and January.  But the NFL is one business.  The FBS conferences are separate businesses.  And if the four-team playoff that kicks off in 2014 does expand at some point, it’s quite likely each conference will be angling to get as many teams into the mix as possible, not just a limited number of two or four.

In Part 1 of our Big Bang series, we looked at which schools we believe would be willing to move if a better offer came along from a new conference (based on athletic revenue and current conference stability).  In our view, there are only about 25 schools that would have any hope of drawing the interest of one of the power leagues.

In Part 2 of our Big Bang series, we broke down those 25 schools according to what they would add to a conference’s stash of cable households as well as a league’s academic reputation (which still matters to some conferences).

In Part 3, we now look at the options available for each of the current five power conferences — ACC, Big Ten, Big XII, Pac-12, and SEC.  How can they survive?  How can they grow and make more money?  Which schools might interest them?

In putting this piece together, we reached out to administrators and athletic department personnel inside the SEC.  We spoke with people in the college sports industry who are familiar with media contracts all across the nation (as well as scuttlebutt regarding which leagues are talking to which schools).  We even chatted with a contact inside a major athletic equipment supplier who speaks with coaches and ADs on a regular basis, picking up plenty of gossip in the process.

The theories below are our own, but they’ve been shaped by the input of these people who were willing to talk off the record about what they’re hearing and what they believe to be happening.  We appreciate their help.

And without further ado, here’s what we see as each conference’s realistic options:

Atlantic Coast Conference

Current Status:  Maryland is leaving for the Big Ten while Pittsburgh, Syracuse and Louisville are scheduled to enter the ACC in all sports.  Notre Dame is currently scheduled to enter the league as a member in all sports but football.  The Irish will schedule five ACC schools per year on the gridiron, but those games will not count in the ACC standings.  The league will be a 15-school league — 14 teams in football — if things don’t change.  Big if.

Outlook/Goal:  The ACC’s outlook is shaky.  The Big Ten, Big XII and SEC are all rumored to have interest in multiple ACC members.  Example: An ACC source told The Sporting News last month that the SEC has been chasing Duke and North Carolina for “the last three years.”  John Swofford’s first goal has to be survival at this point.  The league’s schools aren’t believed to have much interest in signing a grant or rights agreement, so the best hope for avoiding the Big East’s fate is to shore up the football foundation of the league.  Unfortunately, there aren’t many ways for Swofford’s league to do that.  The ACC is the weakest of the five remaining power conferences.  Those schools willing to come aboard are most likely in smaller leagues now, meaning they likely won’t meet the demands of the ACC’s biggest football schools.

Possible Moves/Rumored Interests:

*  The best bet for the ACC would be for Notre Dame to join the league as an all-sports member including football.  Notre Dame is the brand in college football.  Love ‘em, hate ‘em, everyone watches ‘em.  The problem is Notre Dame’s football contract with NBC.  The Irish don’t want to give that away and the ACC is a revenue-sharing league.  If it meant adding a brand name like Notre Dame, would schools like Florida State and Clemson give a thumbs-up to allowing the Irish to forge their own unique deal with the league?  Doubtful.  As for Notre Dame’s desire to maintain its football independence, the breakup of the Big East could give the ACC a tiny bit of leverage.  “Sure, we’ll let you in early in all your other sports, but you have to sign on as a full-fledged football member, too.”  Sounds good, but a league like the Big XII might be able to offer up a “special” deal to Notre Dame and scuttle any ACC attempts to woo the Irish into a true marriage.  More on that in a minute.

*  Barring an every-sport deal with Notre Dame, the two schools most often rumored to be potential ACC targets are Cincinnati and Connecticut.  Cincinnati would provide a mid-America rival for new member Louisville.  UConn would give the ACC more pull in New England and in the New York City area, but current member Boston College has worked against the Huskies joining their league in the past.  Indeed, Louisville was given an invitation before Connecticut.  While Cincinnati and UConn have both been to BCS bowls in recent years, those schools are better known for their basketball than their football.  Would an FSU or Clemson be excited to add either school?  Probably not.  Would schools like Virginia or Georgia Tech be happy to further water down the league’s academic brand?  Probably not.  And if a school like Cincinnati got an offer from another conference, it’s likely the UC administration would choose to join the strongest league… which would not be the ACC.

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As the power brokers of the college football world steered their sport toward a brave new world featuring a four-team playoff, it was widely believed that most conferences would slow down a bit on the expansion and realignment front.  Instead, the Big Ten craftily nabbed Maryland from the ACC and Rutgers from the Big East last month, setting off yet another wave of changes, long before the new playoff format and revenue split had even been fully fleshed out.

After the Big Ten’s shocking move, it was only a matter of time before more dominoes began to fall.  And with seven Big East basketball schools deciding last week that they would break away from the Big Whatever, we believe the Big Bang is here.  We mean the big, Big Bang, too.  Super-conferences rising.  Small leagues folding or partnering with one another for survival.  A super-division of the richest four or five conferences separating itself along a haves and have-nots border.  Television executives dropping stone dead from exhaustion as they negotiate, renegotiate, and then renogotiate again major TV deals worth billions of dollars.

In other words, we’re on the brink of a full-on, A-1, top-drawer madhouse.

We’ve examined conference expansion at MrSEC.com dating back three-plus years now.  We’ve taken a by-the-numbers approach each time because that’s what all this mess has been about — numbers.  Last October we put together a 10-part series on the math of conference expansion/realignment and you can find the final summary to that series here (as well as links to all the other nine parts).

But this latest burst of expansion is an even simpler breakdown.  This time, you can just follow the money.  Schools are looking for new homes because they want to guarantee themselves larger revenue streams.  Many would like to find some stability, too, but the key factor is the cash.

A seat is nice.  A comfy throne is better.

Meanwhile, conferences are trying to cash in on television deals and playoff revenue.  With the Big East on the verge of being adios’ed, it’s already been snipped from the list of major football conferences.  Instead of six big conferences splitting the lion’s share of postseason cash, in the future just five leagues will dominate the playoff era.  And that’s only if the ACC survives.  If it gets picked apart a la the Big East — and money suggests it will be — then there will be but four big-time leagues to horde the majority of playoff cash.

Those four conferences will also dominate the television landscape.  For half a decade, folks have debated whether the SEC got things right by inking huge contracts with CBS and ESPN or whether the Big Ten made the shrewdest move in launching its own TV network.  Turns out, they were both smarter than the rest of the pack.  To make the haul of greenbacks as big as possible, a conference wants both huge, national television contracts and its own network.

So this round of moves comes down to much simpler math than anything we’ve seen before in the expansion/realignment game.  It’s about revenue and it’s about cable households.  Sure, some leagues won’t take schools if they don’t fit a certain academic profile, but now more than ever academics are taking a bigger backseat to cash and television ratings.

With that in mind, this week, we’re going to provide you with some very simple data.  Today, we’ll look at the schools that might be interested in switching conferences.  It’s not hard to figure out which schools would listen to another league’s offer.  Just look at the revenue.

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A tip of the cap to Pete Roussel at CoachingSearch.com.  When you’re in the business of helping coaches land jobs, it raises some questions about credibility.  “Is this true or is he simply trying to help out a friend/client by floating his name?”

Well, Roussel — to my knowledge — was the first to float the idea of ex-Kentucky head coach Joker Phillips landing at Florida as Will Muschamp’s new receivers coach.  And this afternoon, Phillips was indeed announced as the Gators’ new receivers coach and recruiting coordinator. 

Muschamp’s comments:

“We are excited to have Joker join our staff.  His background as a head coach and the number of years he has coached wide receivers will be a tremendous asset to our coaching staff and player.  Joker is obviously very familiar with the Southeastern Conference and has always done a great job in recruiting.”

Phillips, fired last month at his alma mater after three years, will now face the kids he recruited to Lexington next season.

Alabama’s governor Robert Bentley disagrees with Nick Saban’s play-calling at end of Texas A&M game: ”I would actually have run the ball for four straight times.”
Texas A&M DT Spence Nealy on last weekend’s upset of Alabama: “I still can’t believe we won.”
Vanderbilt AD David Williams says VU is “prepared to do what we need to do” to keep James Franklin as head coach
Auburn defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder on whether he’ll be back next year: “I don’t know that I can say that I’m confident.”
Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze isn’t happy with the way SEC officials spotted the ball during Vanderbilt’s game-winning drive on Saturday
Georgia players aren’t looking forward to back-to-back games with triple-option teams Georgia Southern and Georgia Tech
Florida QB Jacoby Brissett will start against Jacksonville State due to QB Jeff Driskel’s sprained ankle, chance Driskel could also miss season-ending game against Florida State
The Big 12 and Southeastern Conference have agreed to a 12-year deal with ESPN for the rights to the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans.
Follow the SEC year-round on MrSEC.com and twitter.com/mrsec

Today, The Knoxville News Sentinel reported that Tennessee would have to pay between $5.6 and $9.3 million to eject Derek Dooley and his staff from their jobs in Knoxville this season.  If Auburn chose to blow up Gene Chizik, he and his staff would have large buyouts as well (the head coach’s alone is believed to be $7.5 million).  Kentucky would have to fork over cash to Joker Phillips and his coaches as well.

But keep in mind that Southeastern Conference schools are about to come into some new money.  A lot of new money.

Starting in 2014, the SEC will begin to reap the financial rewards from its new “Champions” Bowl game with the Big XII.  In addition the biggest chunks of revenue from the television contract for the new college football playoff will be doled out to the biggest conferences… and the SEC is one of those big leagues.  By 2014, the SEC will have also cut new deals with all of its bowl partners, adding some new ones, re-upping with some old ones.  Expect those new agreements to require less ticket buy-back plans which will mean some SEC schools won’t actually lose money when they take large traveling parties to holiday contests.

In addition, an industry source told MrSEC.com this week that he expects the SEC’s new television deals (CBS, ESPN and a new SEC Network) to be worth an extra $10 to $15 million per school per year.

Add it all up and all 14 SEC schools should have more money spilling from their vaults — a lot more money — beginning in 2014.  Might that impact the decisions schools make in 2012 regarding their current coaches?  You’d certainly think so.

Alabama 41 – Michigan 14

1.Crimson Tide build a 31-point first-half lead in front of a record-setting college crowd at Cowboys Stadium.

2. 140 rushing yards – 140 passing yards in the first half for Alabama.

3. New York Times: Alabama Shows It May Not Be No. 2 For Long

4. Drew Sharp: “Another painful reminder that the Southeastern Conference simply executes football at a much higher proficiency than anybody else.”

5. Matt Hayes: “If this was the benchmark of what could be in the race to catch the big, bad SEC, the rest of the field was just lapped.”

6. Gene Wojciechowski: “The Crimson Tide didn’t just beat the Wolverines 41-14; they toyed with them. Embarrassed them. Treated them like an honorary cupcake.”

7. Pat Forde: “Saban is close to building the perfect beast.”

8. Kevin Scarbinsky: “New year, new team, same story. It’s almost getting boring.”

9. College Football Talk: “This country has SEC fatigue, and why wouldn’t it?”

10. Alabama center Barret Jones: ”We’re hungry. And we’re coming for another championship.”

Everyone who’s ever watched a football game knows that turnovers are one of the biggest determining factors in who wins and who loses.  And nowhere is that more true than in the Southeastern Conference.

Missouri and Texas A&M fans, you’re walking into a league where the teams are tightly bunched together and a single dropped ball on gameday can ruin your weekend.  The numbers?  Well, they’re eye-popping.  Plain eye-popping.

We’ve gone back over the past five Southeastern Conference football season and looked at the turnover results in every single SEC versus SEC contest (49 games per year including league title game which equals 245 games overall).  Here a few of the nuggets we found:

* In 2010, 37 of the SEC’s 49 games ended with one team holding an advantage in turnover margin.  The team that was the plus side of turnovers was 32-5 for a winning percentage of 86.4%.

* In 2011, 39 of the SEC’s 49 games ended with one team holding a turnover advantage.  The team that was on the plus side of the turnover battle went 33-6 for a winning percentage of 84.6%.

* In the last two seasons combined — that’s 98 SEC versus SEC games — only 11 times has a team lost the turnover battle and won the game.  That’s a winning percentage of 11.2% if your squad lost the turnover battle during the last two years.

To further break it down, we’ll first look at last year’s numbers and then dig into the 2007-2011 data.  Click to see the full statistics.

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