Texas and Oklahoma’s transition to the SEC creates an interesting issue regarding the conference format.
Keeping traditional divisions is difficult in a schedule that only allows eight or nine league games. This makes room for just one or two cross-divisional games per season, meaning some conference opponents seldom face each other over the course of a decade.
SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey previously mentioned the difficulty of keeping divisions with the addition of Texas and Oklahoma.
“We right now are not thinking about maintaining a two-division format for football scheduling in the SEC. It would potentially be one single division with the idea that we want to rotate our teams through our campuses more frequently.”
A permanent rival system would make much more sense. This creates flexibility to schedule a variety of opponents on a consistent basis while protecting historic rivalry matchups.
Each school gets three teams it plays annually, paired with six rotating games against the rest of the conference. The top two records at the end of the season meet in the SEC title game instead of the traditional division champions.
Here is a projected look at each team’s permanent rivals under such a new SEC format.