The Head Coaches of the SEC met recently down is Destin, Florida and announced that they were going to invent two new rivalries within the conference. Instant rivalries? Excuse me! How do you create a rivalry? You can’t just wave your wand like Harry Potter and have a rivalry emerge from a puff of smoke. It ain’t that easy.
The SEC Committee has announced that there will be two new cross-conference rivalries starting in 2014. Now who found out that the rivalry existed between these schools… and if the rivalry didn’t already exist… where is it coming from? A good rivalry requires a little saucy history between the universities involved.
For the record, the SEC Committee claims that they have now “launched” two new permanent rivalries within the conference… both involving new additions.
Missouri is supposed to be the new rival to Arkansas. That one is at least understandable because the states share a border… like Arkansas and Louisiana. What this will do to the long standing rivalry between Arkansas and LSU (known as the ‘Battle of the Boot’… is anybody’s guess.
But then the second new rivalry announced was between Texas A&M in the middle of Texas and South Carolina which is way up on the Atlantic Coast. What makes them rivals? Because a committee said so? Where’s the history, the color, the drama?
As it stands now the Aggies are expected to go up to Columbia to take on the Gamecocks in 2014… as rivals. I wonder what the players and coaches will be feeling about that. Will the guys at South Carolina really feel like rivals? Just because the league says they should be? Only time will tell.
Current SEC cross-conference rivalries include Alabama-Tennessee, Mississippi State-Kentucky, Ole Miss-Vanderbilt, Auburn-Georgia and LSU-Florida. However, even these games are not really historical rivalries. The SEC is already discussing expanding the cross-conference scheduling in the future so as to increase competition and camaraderie throughout the league.
As a matter of fact, the SEC has already told its member schools not to schedule anymore non-conference games for 2014 or 2015 until they have a chance to work out the future scheduling.
At present the league uses a 6-1-1 scheduling formula for its 14 team league. There are six divisional games with one permanent cross-divisional rivalry and one roaming cross-divisional game. However, there may exist what LSU head coach Les Miles calls a ‘quiet majority’ pushing for a 6-2 format which would eliminate the permanent cross-divisional ‘rivalry’ game and open things up a bit more.
