SEC adding Oklahoma and Texas - my idea for a "pod system"

The Game Room
1

Shortly after the announcement, I was talking to my nephew and he mentioned a system of 4 pods. I got to thinking about, then diagraming it, and thought that I would share my thoughts for other SEC fans to discuss.

**BigSouth pod**                     **Northeast pod**

Texas                            Kentucky
Okalhoma                         Vanderbilt
Texas A&M                        Tennessee
Missouri                         South Carolina

****Southwest pod**                    **Southeast pod****

LSU                              Alabama
Arkansas                         Auburn
Mississippi                      Georgia
Mississippi St.                  Florida

Each team plays the other 3 teams in their pod every year, and 5 or 6 teams from other pods.
I feel that this grouping is best for preserving traditional rivalries. (I think that you could swap Arkansas and Missouri, but other than that, I can’t envision a better grouping.) You still have the Iron Bowl, Egg bowl, Georgia/Auburn, Georgia/Florida. Texas/TAMU is back on, Texas/Oklahoma happens every year, etc.
Also, no matter which of the options below that you go with, every team plays every other team at least once every 3 years (as opposed to every 6 years currently).

Let’s just get the obvious out of the way: There is one pod that is noticeably weaker (at least currently in football) than the others. I think that that is OK. Most of your games (~2x3 vs. 3) will be from other pods, so it’s not like Tennessee or USC have an easy path to the SEC championship game.

[Note: As an Alabama fan, I am looking at this from an Alabama scheduling perspective. I’m referring to Alabama in the scenarios below. Feel free to imagine your own team, how their schedule would look over 2 or 3 years, and what needs to be changed to maintain rivalries that are important to you.]

A.) 8 conference games. Keeping 1 annual rival:
Let’s say Alabama maintains Tennessee as their rival. Bama plays Auburn, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee every year. They play one other team from the NE pod every year (3-year rotation). They play 1 team from one of the other pods, and 2 from the other, on a rotating basis.
So, for example, in addition to playing Auburn, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee every year, they would play Kentucky, Texas, Oklahoma and LSU in the first year.
The next they play Vanderbilt, TAMU, Arkansas and Ol’ Miss.
The 3rd year they play USC, Missouri, Texas, and Mississippi St. Again, every team plays everybody at least once every 3 years.

B.) 9 conference games. No cross-pod rivals
This is way more straightforward. You play 3 teams from your pod and 2 teams from each of the other pods every year. 2 year rotation.

C.) 9 conference games. 1 rival from each pod
This gets more complicated, mostly in picking each “rival”. As a 'Bama fan, I would want to play LSU, but obviously that belongs to Florida.

In fact, I wasn’t sure about most of these rivalries, so here they are for reference from Ranking the SEC's cross-divisional rivalries

Auburn vs. Georgia — Series tied, 55-55-8
Kentucky vs. Mississippi State — Series tied, 21-21
Florida vs. LSU — Florida leads, 31-27-3 (.508 winning percentage)
Alabama vs. Tennessee — Alabama leads, 51-38-7 (.531 winning percentage)
Ole Miss vs. Vanderbilt — Ole Miss leads, 49-38-2 (.550 winning percentage)
Arkansas vs. Missouri — Missouri leads, 4-2 (.667 winning percentage)
South Carolina vs. Texas A&M — Texas A&M leads, 1-0 (1.000 winning percentage)

Oh, I almost forgot, the 2 teams with the best records play for the conference championship. I mean, if you want to argue for the 4 pod “champions” to play 2 semifinal games before that, then feel free to argue for that.

So, what do you think?

BTW, at the risk of derailing my own thread, while I would like to talk pods, I must admit, after thinking and sketching this out, I kind of sort of think that another system might work also.

D.) No pods, no divisions. Just 1 or 2 or 3 annual rivals, and you play everyone else on a rotating basis. Top 2 teams (best record) play for conference championship.

2

I like your pods for the most part, except that I’d prefer that Arkansas replace Missouri in the Big South so that we can have an ultra-former-Big-12-rivalry pod of Texas, TAMU, Arkansas and Oklahoma.

3

As I mentioned, I considered that. I’m not up on my history of the Big8 or SouthWest conferences, so I just grouped together the 4 that were most recently in the Big South*.

*Note: I think it’s silly and confusing that the Big10 has ~14 teams and the Big12 has 10, so I refer to them as the “Big North” and the “Big South”, respectively. I’m hoping this catches on.

4

Arkansas was never in the Big XII. And OU was never in the Southwest Conference. So that can’t be the grouping either. And there’s only two Big 8 teams there.

I’m personally a fan of “play your pod and one consistent team from each other pod every year, the other three are from a rotating pod”. Which gives you differing ad hoc divisions each year. Winner of your ‘division’ goes to the ship.

2025 (I know I know, just go with it) - exXII+SW v NE+SE
2026 - exXII+NE v SW+SE
2027 - exXII+SE v SE+NE

5

No matter what, the conference now has perhaps twice as many “famous rivalries” as any other conference in the nation.

Iron Bowl
Texas vs. A&M (this ought to be a rule, played every year no matter what)
Texas vs Oklahoma (also played every year)
Georgia vs Florida

6

Are you that sure the SEC can get a waiver from the NCAA to play a conference championship game that does not involve the champions of two divisions, each of which has to play every other team in its division?

7

Southeast pod is brutal and the Northeast pod is horrible. Got to mix the two somehow.

8

Although for the most part it is true, it is technically false. OU was in the southwest conference for 4 years (1915-1919).

As for the pods, I would like to see Arkansas in a “POD” with Texas, Texas A&M, and LSU. That way we get to play our real rivalries each year. Missouri is becoming a rivalry, but the others have been our rivalries much longer.

9

As I said, it doesn’t make their schedules THAT much easier.

Also, I don’t think that you want to put too much emphasis on how good teams are currently when trying to divide up a conference. One ancedote that I heard was that in '92 people thought that the divisions were terribly unbalanced, since the East had Georgia, Florida and Tennessee, and the West had nobody good. Fast Forward about 15 years, and the 3 best teams in the country were in the SEC West.

10

Oooh. I’ll take that correction.

It’s probably fine to move UT to a separate pod from OU, just need to truly protect the RRS

11

What is the RRS?

I assume that you mean Texas by “UT”, but without the context, you’re going to have to be more specific. We now have 2 "UT"s. (Of course, South Carolina is still the real “USC”.)

12

You say that now, but I suspect that Austin-UT is going to completely overshadow Knoxville-UT. That’s how they roll; they’re going to do their damnedest to suck all the air out of the room and make it all about UT and burnt orange, and Tennessee is going to be the “other” UT.

13

The Red River Shootout (now “Showdown”) played annually between UT and OU at the Cotton Bowl (the actual Cotton Bowl, not Cowboys Stadium where the Cotton Bowl Game is played).

And both orange, at that. I grew up in Arkansas on the other side of the river from Tennessee, so going to school at Rice, I meant or heard the wrong UT a hundred times before getting it right.

Now, if I said “The Tigers” to refer to an SEC team, I’d really be trolling.

14

I prefer this method. It’s simple and fair. The only change I would make, as others have mentioned, is swapping Arkansas and Missouri. The big question is how do you determine which teams go to the championship game? Leave out the winners of the two weakest pods? Add a conference semifinal?

ETA: If there is a conference semifinal, I think it would have to be rotated. If it’s the same pod matchups every year, whoever is assigned the winner of the northeast pod would have a much easier path to the title.

15

I was doing some reading on the pod idea, and I was surprised to see these mentioned as rivalries. How is Arkansas vs. Mizzou a rivalry? South Carolina and A&M as well? I had never heard of those, but apparently they’re a thing.

16

Under current Division I rules, conference championship games are between the two division winners (round robin games against all division members is required) or, if and only if the conference is small enough, between the top two teams as long as each team has played every other team in the conference. And conference semifinal games are definitely not currently allowed.

There’s currently no system in place for any division of a conference into more than 2 parts or to have more than 1 conference playoff game. So, they’re going to have to not only figure out a pod system but also get sign off from a lot of folks outside the conference to go to a 4 pod system, however they want to do it.

Under the current rules, the simplest (likeliest?) solution is 2 8-team divisions with the same 2 cross division games (1 rotating plus 1 permanent rivalry) plus the 3 bodybag games they typically do anyway. That wouldn’t require any changes to existing rules but they’d need to move to 9 conference games from the current 8.

Quirk of scheduling. Each SEC team has 2 cross division games every year, one that rotates among 6 teams in the other division and 1 permanent ‘rivalry’ game (Alabama-Tennessee and Auburn-Georgia, for example). But that does lead to a situation where the ‘rivalry’ games are sometimes between teams that don’t have a traditional rivalry.

17

A&M’s big rivalries go like this (in order of intensity):

  • A&M-UT: You’ve got the oldest and second-largest public school in Texas vs. the second-oldest and largest public school in Texas.

  • A&M-Texas Tech: Mostly because they are obnoxious as hell, and the best thing in life is to hammer Tech in football, see them driven before us, and hear the lamentations of their women.)

  • A&M-LSU: This one is getting more serious with A&M in the SEC, but it’s been a thing for 30 years or more- sort of an interstate rivalry with our closest neighbor state.

  • A&M-Arkansas: Same sort of thing as A&M-LSU- interstate rivalry made a bit more intense because of the old SWC history.

After those, I can’t think of any. A&M/South Carolina seems to be a non-rivalry, as A&M is 7-0 vs. South Carolina in the SEC. If anything would make it a ‘rivalry’, it’s that there’s a James Bonham trophy that the Texas and SC governor swap to whoever wins, and it’s named after a guy who died at the Alamo, and who went to South Carolina, and was brother to a Governor of South Carolina.

18

I was also surprised. I had assumed that, when they brought in TAMU and Mizzou, that they just made them rivals with each other and left other rivals unchanged. Were USC and Arkansas rivals before that?

19

Most of Arkansas’ traditional rivalries are currently in Texas in other conferences or already in their division.

I think Missouri was an outlier in the SEC East, so they just paired them for an annual cross-division ‘rivalry’ game with Arkansas out of geographic convenience.