![]() ![]() Benson also sees a collection of similar schools in the SEC. Money is a major reason it’s on the table. Money won’t be a problem in a 16-team SEC. “It was the combination of different mission statements from an academic standpoint and more importantly, there wasn’t enough money to satisfy 16 teams.” “People ask me, why did the WAC fail?” former WAC commissioner Karl Benson said Saturday. Frustration reached a breaking point, and eight WAC schools opted to break away and form the Mountain West Conference. That created its own problems, as longtime rivals like Colorado State, Wyoming and Air Force faced the potential of being split up and rarely seeing each other. The WAC planned to vote on permanent divisions in early 1998, scrapping the quads to help with rivalries and travel costs. The league stayed at eight conference games.īut two years into the experiment, the quad/division system had proven untenable for many members. For scheduling purposes, the divisions would change every two years, pairing two different quads, so everyone would play a home-and-home with each other within six years. The WAC’s convoluted plan was to split into two eight-team divisions, and within each division were two four-team quadrants based on geography. When the WAC expanded to 16 teams in 1996, adding several Southwest Conference leftovers and other schools, it faced a tall task in putting the puzzle together with teams stretching from Hawaii to Tulsa to Houston. And there’s a (somewhat) recent example to draw on. But it’s not altogether clean now: Remember when Steve Spurrier petitioned the SEC to change its rules because his South Carolina team, which beat Georgia in 2012, still finished a game behind and lost the division race? In the current format, teams that draw Alabama already have a disadvantage over teams that draw Arkansas. That’s not as clean a way to get there as divisions, because of varying schedules. The top two teams would then make the SEC championship. The cleanest, though not flawless, solution is to keep divisions: Texas and Oklahoma are added to the West, shifting Alabama and Auburn to the East, and Missouri - which has more natural rivalries in the West anyway - goes to its rightful destination. But whether it’s eight or nine games there are two obvious options for the SEC going forward: They were not seriously considering a nine-game schedule, and it’s not clear whether the addition of Texas and Oklahoma would change that. Major college football has only had one other 16-team league in its modern history, and that experiment by the Western Athletic Conference in the late 1990s failed miserably and resulted in a splitting of the conference.ĭon’t expect the same mess this time, but there are lessons to be learned.Įven before all this, the SEC was seriously discussing whether to do away with divisions, potentially going to a pod system. They have to be when 16 teams are involved. But all other possibilities appear on the table. OK, so scratch a 10-game league schedule as a possible solution if Texas and Oklahoma come aboard, creating a 16-team SEC.
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