SEC Latest Power Five Conference to Move to Conference-Only Slate
As the calendar prepares to flip to August, we normally are in the dog days of summer for baseball season, while college football and the NFL have teams in camp practicing to get ready for the season. Meanwhile, the NBA and the NHL have been dormant, preparing for their new season in October. Of course, the key word in that statement was normally and 2020 has been anything but that. The COVID-19 pandemic led to major league baseball delaying their season until it got started last week. Meanwhile, the NBA and NHL seasons are resuming in bubbles with the NBA starting Thursday night in Orlando and the NHL restarting over the weekend in Toronto and Edmonton.
As for college football, things are going to look a little different this season. The Ivy League announced earlier this month that all fall sports were canceled and that they would look to playing in the spring. Meanwhile, the Big Ten, the ACC and the Pac-12 have all announced plans to shift to a conference-only slate for this season, cutting down on travel in an effort to try and curb the spread of the coronavirus. That took some top-tier non-conference games off the slate but it seems to make the most sense.
On Thursday, the SEC became the fourth of the Power Five conferences to announce a shift to a conference-only slate. The conference reportedly has agreed to a 10-game, all-conference schedule to begin on September 26. Should that hold, the SEC Championship Game would take place on December 19. After the announcement was made, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey had the following to say in a statement:
“This new plan for a football schedule is consistent with the educational goals of our universities to allow for the safe and orderly return to campus of their student populations and to provide a healthy learning environment during these unique circumstances presented by the COVID-19 virus. This new schedule supports the safety measures that are being taken by each of our institutions to ensure the health of our campus communities.”
Lost in the shuffle of the conference-only slate are some major rivalry contests between in-state schools. Georgia-Georgia Tech, Florida-Florida State, Louisville-Kentucky and Clemson-South Carolina are all off the board this season. Sankey commented about that as well, saying “It is regrettable that some of our traditional non-conference rivalries cannot take place in 2020 under this plan, but these are unique, and hopefully temporary, circumstances that call for unconventional measures.”
The SEC also loses other non-conference marquee games like LSU-Texas and Tennessee-Oklahoma, games that would have drawn plenty of interest. It comes on the heels of the ACC announcing that they would go with a 10-game conference slate, incorporating Notre Dame into the conference for football purposes this season, and leaving an 11th game for non-conference action. That would have left the potential option for some of those rivalry games previously mentioned to still be played. Instead, it appears that they will be scrapped, dealing a blow to fans of those contests.
Other schools are affected by the decisions made by the Power Five conferences as well. Louisiana Monroe was slated to play Arkansas and Georgia this season, which would have funded $3.2 million to the school’s athletic budget. Massachusetts lost their game with Auburn that would have netted the school $1.9 million toward their budget. Those are big dents to smaller programs that could use the money to keep their athletics department afloat. It remains to be seen how those schools will adjust. The Sun Belt is expected to meet on Friday to discuss the situation while the Big 12, the lone Power Five school yet to make an adjustment, is expected to reach a decision of their own next week.
How this all falls out remains to be seen. We’ll have to wait and see how things continue to unfold at this stage of things. As it stands, several conferences have made their decisions and we’ll have to wait to see if anything changes going forward or not.
