By: Robert Craft

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

Four years after the nine-game debate heated up, and over two years after SEC commissioner Greg Sankey compared the decision to landing a plane, they finally did. They finally landed the plane.

The SEC recently announced that it is officially going to a nine-game schedule, ending a long saga with a vote of school presidents. Now comes the saga within the saga: Who are each team’s annual rivals? They get three now.

The nine-game format has two main components:

Three games against annual opponents.

Six games against non-annual opponents, rotated such that everybody plays each other twice in four years, home and away. (Other than neutral-site games: Georgia-Florida and Oklahoma-Texas.)

This format will begin in 2026 and will be on a four-year cycle.

Sources reiterated that the three annual rivals could be revisited and revised. That gives the conference flexibility to change those annual opponents — either because rivalries evolve, competition standards evolve, or financial needs evolve.

The SEC did not announce the three annual rivals for each team. Sankey pointed to an announcement in December, since those announcements have worked well the past few years.

He added that the schools themselves will be notified earlier, which indicates that the proposed list from years ago has already changed.

That list was done in 2023, and it prioritized historical rivalries and competition. The conference worked with an analytics company to develop a metric that took into account every team’s 10-year record in an effort to balance schedules.

The result was keeping each team’s top one or two rivalries, but sometimes not their third.

Georgia, for instance, would play Florida and Auburn, but then Kentucky, rather than Tennessee or South Carolina. There was also the odd matchup between Florida and Oklahoma.

These odd matchups may still end up being these team’s three annual rivalries.

But sources indicate that the SEC will not follow the earlier proposed 2023 matchup list.

Sankey, appearing on the SEC Network on Thursday, emphasized tradition: “We’ll look at historical rivalries. That’s a really important component,” Sankey said. “We have a lot of those. In fact, in many ways, we’re uniquely positioned to honor those historic rivalries. So those become annual opponents on a schedule. Not everyone has three, but that’s the basis, is three annual opponents.”

The last point is key: Not every school has three teams they would consider historic or geographic rivals. Some have over four. It’s going to be hard to create everyone’s ideal list.

On the other hand, it’s better than the alternative: The eight-game schedule had one annual rival, which meant games like Texas-Texas A&M, Alabama-Tennessee and Auburn-Georgia might not have been played every year.

Yes, Sankey said this year they had a way of continuing to play those games in an eight-game schedule, but it would have created a headache for schedule makers.

That also may have been Sankey’s way of signaling that they were going to end up protecting those rivalries through a nine-game schedule.

So how will it look?

Here is a potential list, prioritizing tradition and geography, not competition. The seemingly most important rivals are listed first:

Alabama: Auburn, Tennessee, LSU

Arkansas: Missouri, Texas, Kentucky

Auburn: Alabama, Georgia, Florida

Florida: Georgia, Auburn, South Carolina

Georgia: Auburn, Florida, South Carolina

Kentucky: Tennessee, Mississippi State, Arkansas

LSU: Alabama, Ole Miss, Texas A&M

Mississippi State: Ole Miss, Kentucky, South Carolina

Missouri: Oklahoma, Arkansas, Vanderbilt

Oklahoma: Texas, Missouri, Texas A&M

Ole Miss: Mississippi State, LSU, Vanderbilt

South Carolina: Georgia, Florida, Mississippi State

Tennessee: Vanderbilt, Alabama, Kentucky

Texas: Oklahoma, Texas A&M, Arkansas

Texas A&M: Texas, Oklahoma, LSU

Vanderbilt: Tennessee, Ole Miss, Missouri

This isn’t perfect. It leaves out some natural geographic rivals like Alabama and Mississippi State, which are only about 90 miles apart.

It also leaves out historic rivals like Florida and LSU, who developed a good cross-division rivalry during the SEC East-West days. But it does restore Auburn and Florida, who were annual opponents until 2002.

There are also “fill-in” games, such as South Carolina-Mississippi State. It would be great to have Mississippi State play Alabama, but who would Alabama ditch among Auburn, Tennessee and LSU?

Television matters. ESPN is set to pay each school an estimated $5 million extra for adding the ninth game, per multiple sources.

A driving force of this decision was to enhance the viewership of the regular season, sources confirm.

This makes the most sense as the conference enters the College Football Playoff expansion, which would seem to erode the impact of the regular season.