SEC Expansion: Why Missouri Makes Neither Sense nor Cents for League

The University of Missouri has indicated that while the Tigers might end up in the Southeastern Conference by default, that league is not the school’s first choice.  Speaking from the heart of SEC country, let me take this opportunity to say the feeling is mutual. 

Missouri does not fit in the SEC. 

Missouri is neither in the South nor the East. It has no natural rival within the conference other than maybe Arkansas, who will never rank Missouri higher than third on its most-hated list no matter what. 

Plus, the conference already has more Tiger mascots than it can comfortably handle. 

The problems with Missouri go deeper.  Adding Missouri as the SEC’s 14^th team means shifting someone (likely Auburn) to the Eastern Division, which would mean the end of annual rivalry games like Auburn vs. LSU and Alabama vs. Tennessee.  

Adding a team—any team—from the geographic East avoids these problems.  Adding Missouri as the league’s Western outpost makes them unavoidable.

But the biggest strike against Missouri is not its remote geography as much as its culture. 

I used to live in St. Louis.  It is a great sports town, so long as the sports we are talking about are baseball and hockey.  St. Louis is also unmistakably a professional sports city. 

I remember driving around St. Louis running errands on fall Saturdays and being frustrated that the local sports radio stations aired shows like “Golf Talk” on Saturday afternoons rather than football scoreboard shows.  College sports are just a blip on the radar in much of Missouri.

While the Missouri Tigers have a devoted fan base full of good people, there are a large number of sports fans in the state who don’t follow college sports.  And even the ones who do follow Missouri sports don’t follow them with the same unhealthy breathless fervor that exists among those from SEC territory.

The fact is, the average Missouri fan does not plan their life around Missouri Tiger athletics.  While this sane and rational position is no doubt good news for their emotional well-being, it separates them from the other 13 SEC programs, for whom sanity is the enemy of passion. 

I’m not the first to suggest that Missouri does not belong in the SEC.  The counter-argument to that thought usually says to forget about culture and look at the eyeballs the SEC could bring with Missouri on board. 

That argument makes some superficial sense, but wilts upon closer inspection.

Just because the state of Missouri has a large population does not mean that a large number of people there passionately follow Missouri Tigers athletics.  Missouri football ranks fourth among priorities in St. Louis, falling behind the lowly Rams, much less the beloved Cardinals and Blues. In Kansas City, the Chiefs, Royals and more proximate Kansas Jayhawks take priority. 

There may be a large number of television sets in the State of Missouri, but there aren’t that many people watching the Missouri Tigers.  Whoever is telling SEC Commissioner Mike Slive that Missouri brings with it a large television audience has not done their homework.        

The more fundamental problem with Missouri’s population-based argument is that that kind of thinking goes against what made the SEC great to begin with. The Iron Bowl does not draw huge ratings because Alabama has large media markets.  LSU doesn’t draw huge ratings numbers because of Louisiana’s one top-50 media market. 

The SEC is not the nation’s most watched conference because of the television markets within its footprint. People watch SEC games because of the quality of its teams and the passion of its fans. 

To bring a slightly above-average football program with a casually passionate fan base would dilute what makes the conference great. 

No matter how many television dollars the school would supposedly bring, Missouri has no business playing in the SEC.

Raiding the ACC for a team like Florida State, Clemson or Virginia Tech would enhance both the league’s on-field product and its culture.  If the ACC has locked its borders, West Virginia, with its passionate fan base and greater history of sustained success, would be a great addition without bringing the geographic negatives that Missouri does.

Make no mistake, if the SEC is left with Missouri as its best option, the league would still survive and even thrive.

But speaking as a fan of the SEC, Missouri is certainly not our first choice.