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The Southeastern Conference is transferring away from early season cupcakes. It’s been years inside the making and likely lengthy late.
The powerhouse league nevertheless has a few groups lagging within the scheduling branch, reputedly not quite ready to head all in for aggressive reasons. But beefing up schedules is really at the horizon for all people, particularly once the SEC adds Oklahoma and Texas.
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"You can’t just open the gates and supply human beings a 12-inch piece of wood to sit down on anymore," Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin said.
Stricklin referred to as the shift in philosophy "marketplace driven," pointing to lovers, players and television partners wanting better matchups on a weekly foundation.
It’s hardly unique to the SEC, especially in view that power of schedule plays a role in figuring out which groups make the College Football Playoff. And with the CFP planning eyeing enlargement, there’s even greater cause for a number of the country’s pinnacle applications – those watching for to vie for coveted playoff spots – to feature more tough games.
While lovers may additionally are becoming spoiled looking closing season’s all-SEC slate of video games because of COVID-19 concerns, it might be tough to bitch about a great deal of the league’s 2021 schedules.
Top-ranked Alabama thumped Miami. No. 2 Georgia edged Clemson. Mississippi routed Louisville. LSU misplaced at UCLA. And that was just Week 1.
This weekend's slate consists of Pittsburgh-Tennessee, Colorado-Texas A&M, Texas-Arkansas and North Carolina State-Mississippi State.
And then Auburn plays at Penn State and Vanderbilt host Stanford in Week three, accompanied via Missouri at Boston College.
"It method loads for self assurance," Georgia educate Kirby Smart stated. "Confidence can help. Can overconfidence hurt? Yes, but there’s a line there. The enjoy of the environment is what I value. Win, lose, or draw, the experience of that environment become going to make us higher, and that's what I benefit from it.
"Does it give some of the gamers extra self belief? Yes, it gives them more self belief. It does, however it better no longer deliver them overconfidence due to the fact humility is one week away."
Alabama and LSU have led the league’s push to reinforce schedules. The Crimson Tide have opened each of the closing 10 seasons with a Power Five opponent – and gained all of them. The Tigers, meanwhile, have scheduled in addition for nine instantly years.
The rest of the league is catching up.
"One of the tougher activities is to choose what the destiny of university football is going to be," said Florida coach Dan Mullen, who is coming into his seventeenth yr inside the SEC. "If you look and say, ‘OK, six years in the past, we’re going to have a playoff and that is how they’re going to judge it and evaluate the playoff.’ It’s hard to choose that in the future, that a long way.
"And scheduling is hard. As you call human beings, there are a variety of individuals who are booked out manner into the destiny. And then you definately get into the difficulty of the way is the SEC time table going to paintings 4 and 5 and 6 years in the past from now? I recognise what our function is proper now as a league."
Four SEC groups – Florida, Georgia, Kentucky and South Carolina – have everlasting, non-convention contention video games in opposition to the Atlantic Coast Conference that they insist make scheduling a bit extra difficult. The Gators play Florida State. The Bulldogs play Georgia Tech. The Wildcats play Louisville. And the Gamecocks play Clemson.
When those SEC teams are on the road each different yr, they have one fewer domestic sport that impacts the lowest line.
"Our strength of time table is form of constructed in," Stricklin stated. "You want to have six, preferably seven domestic games a yr. And while you start doing home-and-homes or begin gifting away impartial-web page games, that eats into how many domestic games you’re going to have.
"Knowing the fee of the home game to our campus and to the town, I don’t recognize that we need to be there. We may grow to be being there in the future, but we’ve now not taken that method."
Adding Oklahoma and Texas have to change everything. The SEC is predicted to revamp its scheduling version once the Big 12 juggernauts arrive, whether it’s in 2025 as currently planned or faster, in hopes of anyone playing every different extra often.
"Scheduling is only a challenging deal and we’re going to hold to work at it," Stricklin said. "We do need to look for opportunities where we are able to make it greater exciting for our fanbase."
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