In the beginning, former SEC commissioner Roy Kramer created divisions so he could hold a championship game. The NCAA rules required it. Eventually, other conferences followed suit.
By last year, however, all Power 4 conferences had ditched divisions, while keeping their championship games, as NCAA rules allowed. And now the future of those championship games is in question, in part because the process for deciding who appears in them has become an unwieldy mess.
It nearly caused a calamity in the ACC, where the best team (Miami) didn’t make the championship game. There was a four-way tie for first place in the SEC, rematches in three of the four power-conference title games, and in most conferences a morass of tiebreakers.
If conference championship games continue — a separate debate, alongside the future of the College Football Playoff format — there’s an easy solution: Go back to smaller conferences that make geographic sense, where everyone plays each other, and all everyone has to do is sacrifice a bunch of television money.
Hopefully you enjoyed a good laugh with that one.
In the meantime, another solution has been offered up: Go back to divisions, the way Kramer, who died last week, did when he created the SEC championship in 1992. Split the conferences in two, everyone plays their division, plus a cross-division game or two, then match the division winners in a championship. Boom.
This could end up as a good solution … except in the SEC, and its fellow super league, the Big Ten. With the SEC announcing its first nine-game schedule on Thursday night, here’s why the conference, as currently constructed, isn’t going back to divisions anytime soon, if ever:
Better games
It’s not an accident that the SEC has dominated TV ratings over the past two years, which coincided with expansion and getting rid of divisions. The conference has had better matchups that may not have happened if it had kept East and West divisions.
Say for the sake of geography Alabama and Auburn were shifted to the East, with Missouri moving to the West, joined by Oklahoma and Texas. Even if — just for the sake of argument — there had been a nine-game schedule, it would have left room for only two cross-division games for each team. You may not have had Georgia-Texas, Georgia-Ole Miss, Alabama-Oklahoma, Florida-LSU, etc.
Teams in opposite divisions would only play each other once every four years. Meanwhile, many of the division “rivalries” would grow as stale as they did pre-2024. Talk to some SEC athletic directors about how hard it was becoming to sell season-ticket packages, especially in the SEC East.
In the current setup, with no divisions, everyone plays each other at least once every two years. The only annual games are the three protected rivalries.
“Over four years, each of our teams will visit all of our stadiums, all of our campuses, except for those neutral-site games that we have,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said last week. “That’s very different than the divisional scheduling model where we have 12-year gaps between a team visiting. We’ve had some teams not visit since our prior expansion. That’s a step in the right direction.”
Put another way: The diversity of matchups and more interesting games is a good trade-off for some messiness in deciding who makes the championship game.
In an SEC with divisions, Georgia and Texas would likely play less often. (Todd Kirkland / Getty Images)
Playoff impact: None
A big reason many other conferences, especially the ACC, may want to return to divisions is to ensure their best teams don’t miss the championship game because of a fairly irrelevant tiebreaker. It almost cost Miami a CFP spot.
But Playoff spots aren’t at much of a premium in the SEC. Texas A&M, Ole Miss and Oklahoma all missed the SEC championship but safely made the field.
The same goes for the Big Ten, where Oregon sat at home last week but safely made it in as the No. 5 seed. Last year, Ohio State didn’t make the Big Ten championship but made the field and won the national title.
Would it really solve much?
Yes, everybody in the same division would play each other, so you would have more head-to-head tiebreakers, rather than going to the fourth tiebreaker — conference opponents’ combined records — which decided Alabama and Georgia would play this year, rather than Texas A&M or Ole Miss.
But there were issues in divisions, too. In the SEC, who teams drew as their two non-division opponents had a big impact. There was 2012, when Steve Spurrier got upset that his South Carolina team waxed Georgia, but lost out because it played at LSU and Florida, which were both top-10 teams. Spurrier proposed a rule that division record determined who won the division, not overall conference record, but it was shot down.
There were also long periods when one division had the strongest teams, especially the SEC West, where in 2011 and 2017, Alabama didn’t win the division but still won the national title.
Yes, a non-division setup means you may get rematches, as the SEC has the past two years. But in many years, you also stand a better chance of ending up with the two best teams in the championship game.
One league
This, other than the stale schedules, was an underlying reason the SEC ditched divisions. The East and West had long felt like they were different worlds, teams often strangers to each other. Georgia and Texas A&M have still only played each other once since the Aggies joined the conference in 2012. Auburn and Florida, once annual rivals, have only played twice since 2008. LSU and Tennessee only played once between 2012 and 2021. And so on.
A separate culture in football sprang up over time: SEC West schools were known for spending more, because they were competing to beat only each other. Florida and Georgia, the schools with the most resources in the SEC East, were more thrifty because they didn’t have to spend as much to beat the Vanderbilts and Kentuckys. When Georgia became the last SEC school to build a full-length indoor facility, Kirby Smart, who had just come from Alabama, answered a question about Georgia’s progress by saying: “We’re still playing catch-up to the schools in the SEC West.”
Now it’s no longer the East and the West. It’s just one SEC. And the conference is better off for it, even if it means some minor headaches.
