The SEC is having its spring meetings down in Destin, Fla., a lovely slice of white-sand beach down on the Gulf Coast. It’s a fairly casual event, so much so that Nick Saban almost smiled (OK, it’s more of a smirk, but take that smirk and enjoy it, because that’s a close as you’re gonna get). But they have to do a little bit of business down there, if only for tax write-off purposes, and so they’ve apparently decided on how to arrange the football schedule now that Texas A&M and Missouri have turned the SEC into a 14-team league. According to several reports, they’re going to a 6-1-1 schedule — six games against your division opponents, one against a permanent opponent from the other division, and one rotating team from the other division.
This preserves some longtime cross-division rivalries (Tennessee-Alabama, Georgia-Auburn) and cements a couple of interesting new ones (South Carolina-Texas A&M, Arkansas-Missouri). Les Miles is not that happy about LSU playing Florida every year, but it’s hard to tell whether Les thinks Florida is an unfair challenge, or whether the humidity and alligators of Gainesville are just an inferior version of his daily life in Baton Rouge. At least Lexington has horsies.
The larger point is, in a league with so many good teams, a little break in the schedule from year to year can mean the difference between a national-title run and the Capital One Bowl.