When Texas and Oklahoma finally join the SEC, it is expected that the conference’s football schedule will expand from each team playing eight games to each team playing nine. According to John Fricke, that expansion and the payoff that will come with it should be front and center during the league’s meetings in Destin, Florida this week.
“Whatever happens in Destin will change college football forever,” he said Tuesday morning on 92.9 The Game in Atlanta. “The question is at what level.”
Producer Abe Gordon objected to Fricke’s idea that the league could get the Longhorns and Sooners into the conference in time for the 2023 football season. The two schools would owe a significant buyout check to their current conference, the Big 12.
Fricke countered by saying that ESPN knows the value the two schools would bring to the league. A sixteen-team SEC would give each conference member a payout big enough to justify cutting a big one-time check to speed the process along.
Adding two more teams would force the SEC to rethink its current schedule and divisions. Fricke says ESPN, which will take over all of the television rights to SEC sports in 2024, is ready to pony up for anything that means one more in-conference football game each year.
“They don’t want to pay for Georgia versus, you know, pick a team, Liberty. They want to pay for Georgia versus Ole Miss. So ESPN is saying ‘you give us that extra week of conference games and the number we are going to pay you goes up exponentially because it’s an extra week of games, SEC games that get millions of people watching.”
John Fricke told his partner Hugh Douglas that he isn’t predicting when the conference will make the additions of Texas and Oklahoma official. He just doesn’t see the financial roadblocks that others have implied exist.
“The SEC is ready to move along,” he said. “Maybe the league just floats them the money because they could. They could say ‘You have a $30 million buyout? Fine, everybody will chip in because we’re all gonna make so much more money. We’ll help with the buyout to get you into the league.”
