New SEC football scheduling format

That is correct. At Syracuse. (Excluding bowls, of course).

They are going to play Michigan in Dallas to open the 2017 season, however.

 

I'm not getting on your case, because you're just repeating this oft-used mantra, but this is the biggest of jack-around bullshit out there about scheduling. Any school that plays Florida State every year and Miami frequently is fine by me. And a lot of the "outside the state" games that fit into that little category are much closer than, say, the 350 miles between Gainesville and Atlanta for a hypothetical game against Georgia Tech, which I think is the closest school that would satisfy this narrow requirement.

 

I don't know if it's by legislative fiat or just a long-standing tradition, but LSU typically schedules a non-conference game against an in-state opponent (i.e. ULM, ULL, Tulane, La. Tech)

 

That started when Skip Bertman was the AD. Instead of paying a far-away school like Idaho or Wyoming to come to Baton Rouge, he wanted to keep the money in Louisiana and pay one of the smaller state schools to come in for an ass-whipping. They play all of them on some sort of rotating basis.

 

The reason some teams travel far is for recruiting. Tennessee historically has NEEDED to play games at UCLA or Oregon or Notre Dame. Florida doesn't.

 

I think that if you're going to play a smaller school or far lesser program in a nonconference game, In-state is a good way to do it.

 

Right, and I had that in my second sentence. If you play Florida State and Miami and a SEC schedule, I don't care how many other directional schools are on the schedule. The top SEC schools typically seem to play at least one good non-conference opponent a year. Florida, Georgia, South Carolina all have non-conference in-state rivals that are always big games. Tennessee has traveled for non-conference games, so has LSU and Alabama. I know in the past Auburn played at USC, although I think that was awhile ago.

 

How many of those games had them actually step foot on another team's campus?

 

How many Big Ten, Big 12 or Pac-12 teams in your fantasy world have traveled for non-conference games in November?

Even when USC and Stanford travel to Notre Dame, it's in October.

 

They don't. But that's because - with a few exceptions - those conferences play just about all of their non-con games in September.

 

In the case of LSU, it went to Washington in 2009, West Virginia in 2011, and played TCU in Arlington (a neutral-site game, but in TCU's backyard). It's also scheduled to play at Syracuse in 2015 and Wisconsin at Lambeau Field in 2016. That's on top of home-and-home series it's had with Virginia Tech and Arizona in the past decade, plus a road game at Arizona State (moved from Baton Rouge to Tempe because of Katrina) that never got returned because of various schedule changes in the ensuing years.

 

I don't understand this thread. It seems to me to pretty hard to argue that the SEC schools schedule a lot of cupcakes given they only play eight conference games. I think that an SEC schools blowing out Middle Tennessee or whoever in November is boring from a fan 's point of view.

It is also my belief that the SEC is still the best conference in college football, no matter who the schools schedule outside the conference. To criticize the scheduling of the SEC is not to negate their accomplishments.