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Bama News
There was a lot of complaining on Friday night that someone at the poker table was dealing from the bottom of the deck when the whole game was being played in a house of cards.
The Southeastern Conference announced its two additional cross-divisional opponents for football teams in 2020 on Friday afternoon. There were only two possible outcomes — either Alabama and Florida would be playing each other or conspiracy theories would immediately flourish like mold in a damp basement. The latter is what occurred. Alabama, it was announced, would play Missouri and Kentucky. Every other SEC fan base (except the Gators) started with the predictable howls of “bias,” the same howls that have been going on for 60 years. (One wonders what would have happened if the internet had existed when Bear Bryant ran the league.) Although it may be like explaining a chess game on the deck of the Titanic, here is a quick synopsis of the SEC process. You have to take the long view, not the short, even if a Nick Saban/ Dan Mullen Alliance of Evil — like Thanos and Pennywise teaming up — is a fun image. If the SEC’s purpose was for every team to play as close to .500 as possible, that would have made for one type of schedule. But if your purpose is to have a team in the College Football Playoff, which means money, you take a different route. That’s why Alabama and Florida and LSU and Georgia and Auburn that came up with the schedules they did, taxing but not suicidal. Because if you play out the hypothetical “season” and look at the schedules of Clemson, Oklahoma and Ohio State, you understand that the rest of the nation is essentially playing for one spot. A onetime expansion of the College Football Playoff would have solved this, but unprecedented times apparently call for entrenched institutions, as cautious as tortoises, to shun any sort of innovation.
Under the current circumstances, a max-difficulty schedule for the top teams increases the likelihood that a hypothetical champion could easily emerge from the hypothetical championship game at 9-2. With no interconference games to use for comparison, what happens then if Oregon is sitting at 10-1, for instance?
Or if Notre Dame and Clemson split a regular season matchup and the ACC title game and both finish 11-1?
That’s not as fun as a conspiracy theory but it does explain more. I’m not arguing that it worked out well for Arkansas, which got the full treatment for being cooked aside from the symbolic apple in its mouth.
Clucking like hens while the fox circles the henhouse doesn’t last long, though. The coronavirus cares for neither your conspiracy theory nor your other opponents, just winning by its own rules.
Nominally, the next issue for the SEC is releasing the 2020 schedule. By the time that happens, it seemed on Saturday, some other leagues may have folded on the season. The Big Ten, which raced to be first with everything including a September 5 start, stomped on the brakes Saturday by postponing the start of full-contact practice.
There is still a huge amount of money at stake for Power Five leagues but there is also real reservation on the part of players who deserve “yes” or “no”answers in order to make fullyinformed opt-out decisions. If schools attempt to put players on the field without those answers, there will be backlash.
We may see an SEC schedule in the coming week. We may just see the flickering neon of a “closed” sign before it ever gets here, no matter how much everyone hopes it doesn’t happen.
