Alabama Football: Tide will play Auburn and ? in ’24 SEC schedule
By Ronald Evans
It was announced on Thursday that Alabama Football and the SEC’s other 15 teams will play an eight-game regular season in 2024. The decision was made at the annual SEC Spring Meeting in Destin, FL.
Although moving to nine SEC games is off the table for 2024, the entire issue will be revisited for 2025 and beyond. According to SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, the added time for review will allow for more consideration of the impact of the 12-team Playoffs.
Perhaps more importantly, it will allow more time for the SEC and ESPN to negotiate additional payments that will be expected when (or if) the conference decides to expand to a nine-game schedule.
In the 2024 season, every SEC team is required to play a ninth game against a non-conference Power Five opponent.
As expected the SEC will have no divisions in 2024. The two teams with the best records will compete in the SEC Championship game.
Asked about continuing traditional rivalries, Greg Sankey said,
"Are you asking me are we not going to play the Iron Bowl and the Egg Bowl? I won’t be the commissioner if that happens."
Beyond the Iron Bowl Alabama football fans will have to wait to learn more. The wait will not be a long one. In a televised special on June 14th, the 2024 SEC schedule will be revealed. It is believed efforts will be made to continue other traditional rivalries such as Alabama vs. Tennessee and Georgia vs. Florida.
Sankey said in the roughly 40 different options considered, balanced strength of schedule was and will continue to be a goal.
"We’ve also tried to think more about the balance around our strength of schedule. So in the divisional format, there is a fairly broad range on a year-to-year basis around strength of schedule. We won’t make that perfect. Not everyone will have the same strength of schedule. If a team has gone undefeated in the past, you can’t match a team up that went undefeated against itself, so that skews some other schedules.We’re going to try to achieve, to a greater extent than perhaps we’ve seen in the divisional model, a narrower band of variance around our strength of schedule."
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Apparently, the final decision was a unanimous one, though with considerable work still to be done by mid-June.