Week 12 Slate Proof the SEC Should Play 9 Conference Games
If you're looking for a good nap, need to get some early holiday shopping done, prepare for Thanksgiving or want to take a quick vacation before bowl season, do it this Saturday.
You won't miss much, at least in the SEC.
Week 12 of the season—the penultimate weekend of the season—more closely resembles the itinerary for a sleep study than it does a big weekend in college football.
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Florida hosts Florida Atlantic, Georgia hosts Georgia Southern, Kentucky hosts Charlotte, South Carolina hosts The Citadel, Alabama hosts Charleston Southern and Auburn hosts Idaho this week, before all of them take on their intra-state rivals during the final weekend of the regular season.
| 12:00 | Florida Atlantic | Florida |
| 12:00 | The Citadel | South Carolina |
| 3:30 | LSU | Ole Miss |
| 4:00 | Idaho | Auburn |
| 4:00 | Charleston Southern | Alabama |
| 7:00 | Mississippi State | Arkansas |
| 7:00 | Georgia Southern | Georgia |
| 7:15 | Tennessee | Missouri |
| 7:30 | Texas A&M | Vanderbilt |
| 7:30 | Charlotte | Kentucky |
Is this really what we want college football to be?
Of course not.
Four of those SEC teams listed—Florida, Georgia, Kentucky and South Carolina—have already wrapped up SEC play despite being two weeks away from the end of the season.
That should be unacceptable.
The SEC season goes out with a similar whimper every year, and it's time to fix it—even if it does present a more difficult path to the College Football Playoff for the eventual conference champion.
How?
Two very simple, doable and quick fixes—a nine-game conference schedule and a mandate that conference games must be played during the next-to-last weekend of the season.
The long-term conference scheduling format that is slated to last through 2025, and the SEC must change the eight-game conference schedule to a nine-game conference schedule starting in 2017 (since the full 2016 schedule has already been released, and changing that now is nearly impossible).
The SEC—like all other major college football conferences—isn't simply an athletic conference anymore; it's a programming arm for its television partners. This weekend, it's doing a disservice to its partners. Sure, LSU at Ole Miss at 3:30 p.m. ET on the CBS game of the week is a decent game, but outside of that it's a snooze-fest.
On the SEC's own network, fans are getting Florida Atlantic at Florida, The Citadel at South Carolina, Idaho at Auburn, Charleston Southern at Alabama, Texas A&M at Vanderbilt and Charlotte at Kentucky.
Is that worth the $1.30 per customer inside of the footprint that the SEC Network costs, according to the Sports Business Journal?
Of course not.
The SEC needs to add a ninth conference game and mandate that conference games must be played on the next-to-last weekend of the season.
The conference has a mandate that every conference team must play a Power Five team from outside of the conference. Keep that in place. After all, four SEC East teams already accomplish that every season thanks to intra-state rivalry games with ACC teams, and another SEC West team should have one with a former Big 12 power (looking at you, Texas A&M and Texas).
If those are going to be played at the end of the season, why not mandate conference games the week before?
A ninth conference game that's mandated to be played during the next-to-last weekend of the season would create so much intrigue during the final month of the season, reduce the number of paycheck games within the conference and relegate tune-ups to where they belong—the beginning of the season. It also would prolong conference title races—which would benefit fans and television partners and prevent tune-ups for teams who put emphasis on rivalry games.
That would be a win for not only SEC fans, but college football fans.
Sure, it'd be slightly more difficult for an SEC team to get into playoff position by essentially eliminating one cupcake game. But if you don't think that the ninth conference game played in the Big 12 and Pac-12 is being talked about inside the walls of Grapevine, Texas, where the selection committee is meeting every week this month, you're out of your mind.
By not regulating the schedule more and allowing teams the freedom to schedule cupcakes prior to rivalry weekend, the SEC is robbing networks of ratings and fans of the November they deserve.
Quotes were obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted. Statistics are courtesy of cfbstats.com.
Barrett Sallee is the lead SEC college football writer and national college football video analyst for Bleacher Report, as well as a host on Bleacher Report Radio on SiriusXM 83. Follow Barrett on Twitter @BarrettSallee.
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