It is widely assumed that once Texas and Oklahoma officially join the SEC that the league will go to a nine-game conference schedule for football. In a column last week, Ross Dellenger of Sports Illustrated noted that the conference and ESPN do not have deal yet to compensate members for another conference game, but Paul Finebaum thinks it is merely a formality at this point.
The SEC Network host made his weekly appearance on McElroy & Cubelic in the Morning on WJOX in Birmingham on Monday and said that he expects university presidents to approve the move to a ninth conference game by next week. After that, he thinks ESPN will open its checkbook quickly to secure more inventory.
“ESPN ultimately has to decide, I’m sure, ‘do we adjust it?’ and the answer is probably yes,” Finebaum told Cole Cubelic, who also works for the SEC Network. “I don’t want to be spending your boss’s and my boss’s money, but I’ll go ahead and do it. It makes perfect sense to go to nine games.”
Fans, players, and coaches alike are buzzing about what a nine game schedule would look like in the SEC. The most popular model sees the conference abandoning divisions. Instead, each team would play three permanent opponents and rotate the remaining teams. The goal is that in a four year college career, a player would see every SEC school both at home and on the road.
“It would be very difficult to do what everybody is talking about doing with eight games,” Finebaum said. “It defeats the whole purpose of changing from divisional play to this three/six.”
There has been plenty of talk about just how much ESPN would be willing to pay for a 16-team SEC. USA Today has even speculated that the conference could out-earn the NCAA in broadcasting revenue by the second year of the deal the two sides will start in 2024.
