Buckle up, Kentucky fans: SEC football as you have known it is gone in 2024
For fans of Kentucky and other SEC schools, the “experience of Southeastern Conference football” you have long known is over.
Starting next season, following football in the SEC will be transformed on multiple levels:
▪ No longer will the SEC be divided between East and West divisions;
▪ No longer will the league be using the division-based scheduling format that, since 1992, has dictated who plays who in the SEC;
▪ The conference will move from 14 teams to 16 with the arrivals of Big 12 heavyweights Oklahoma and Texas;
▪ No longer will the SEC have its best game of each week telecast at 3:30 p.m. by CBS. Instead, Disney-owned networks, ABC and the ESPN channels, will broadcast all SEC-controlled football games;
▪ No longer will the SEC be associated with the iconic theme music that CBS used to introduce Southeastern Conference football on the network;
▪ And, perhaps most-significant of all to the fan experience, no longer will the SEC have Nick Saban as a dominating coaching presence at the league’s flagship football program.
For fans of SEC schools other than Alabama, the announced retirement last week of Saban, the ultra-successful Crimson Tide head man, potentially transforms “the experience” of Southeastern Conference football in a profound way.
In an epic coaching run, Saban turned Alabama into a daunting and perennial road block for denying the dreams of other SEC football fan bases.
From the time Bama lured Saban away from the NFL’s Miami Dolphins to be its head coach in 2007, the two schools that had the most success against the Crimson Tide were Auburn and LSU — who went 5-12 and 5-13, respectively, vs. the Crimson Tide.
Otherwise, no SEC team beat Alabama more than twice in the entire time, 2007 through 2023, that Saban ran the show in Tuscaloosa.
Among the teams other than Auburn and LSU that played Bama every year, Texas A&M (which entered the league in 2012) went 2-10 against Saban; Mississippi went 2-15; Mississippi State went 1-16; Tennessee went 1-16; and Arkansas went 0-17.
Kirby Smart left Saban’s Alabama coaching staff after 2015 and turned Georgia into the “Alabama of the SEC East.” Nevertheless, Smart went 1-5 head-to-head vs. his old boss.
Among the seven SEC East schools, Georgia at 2-8, was the only one to beat Saban-coached Crimson Tide teams more than once. Combined, the East schools finished 5-48 vs. Saban-led Bama.
Regardless of who Alabama taps to be its new coach, Saban’s absence frees up other SEC fan bases to more-realistically dream that the Crimson Tide might at last be toppled from their perch atop the league.
That alone represents a massive change in the fan dynamics for 2024 around SEC football.
The scheduling alterations that are accompanying the end of division play are going to impact the fan experience far more, I suspect, than many have yet realized.
Conventional wisdom has been the question of whether a significant number of the SEC’s “secondary” rivalries will survive on an annual basis — think Auburn-Georgia, Tennessee-Alabama, LSU-Alabama, Florida-Tennessee — hinges on whether the league ultimately stays with an eight-game conference slate or moves to nine-league contests a year.
The working theory has been that an eight-game slate will end many annual rivalries while a nine-game schedule makes possible the preservation of most of the SEC’s meaningful rivalries on a yearly basis.
However, even the nine-game schedule may not preserve the annual league rivalry that has always meant the most to the Big Blue Nation.
We know that on Nov. 2, 2024, UK will travel to Knoxville to face border rival Tennessee. Apparently, whether the SEC ultimately adopts the eight- or nine-game league schedule, this coming season will be the final year that UK and UT will meet as annual rivals.
On his Oct. 23 weekly radio show, Wildcats coach Mark Stoops was asked what the future of the Kentucky-Tennessee series will be.
In remarks that drew little attention in real time, Stoops said at the 27:28 mark of his show (which is still available on the UK Athletics app) that “regardless of whether (the future SEC schedule format) is nine or eight (games) or whatever, we will not play (Tennessee) every year.”
Given that UT has won 36 of the past 39 meetings with UK, maybe anything that shakes up the status quo is ultimately to the benefit of Kentucky.
Still, other than 1943 — when neither Kentucky nor Tennessee fielded football teams due to World War II — UK and UT have played football every season since 1919. Overall, the Wildcats and Volunteers have played football 119 times, the third-most-often-played series among SEC schools.
A new scheduling format that leaves UK football not playing every year against the one league team its fan base most yearns to beat seems an unhappy, even an unfair, outcome for Cats backers.
So saying goodbye to Kentucky-Tennessee as an annual football series may be one more change 2024 will be bringing to UK fans.
How SEC teams fared vs. Saban
The records against Alabama teams coached by Nick Saban of all other SEC football teams:
▪ Arkansas 0-17
▪ Auburn 5-12
▪ Florida 1-8
▪ Georgia 2-8
▪ Kentucky 0-6
▪ LSU 5-13
▪ Mississippi 2-15
▪ Mississippi State 1-16
▪ Missouri 0-4
▪ South Carolina 1-2
▪ Tennessee 1-16
▪ Texas A&M 2-10
▪ Vanderbilt 0-4
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