The SEC has officially agreed to adopt a nine-game conference schedule for football, beginning with the 2026 season. It's a new era for the league, with hopes that an aggressive scheduling philosophy will curry favor for the league with the College Football Playoff committee. Along with a nine-game league schedule, the SEC also announced that its member institutions will be required to play at least one non-conference opponent from a power-four conference or Notre Dame.
As part of the league's new scheduling system, each team will get three permanent rivals that are on the schedule every single year. The other six league games will be on rotation, meaning you will make your way through the entire league every two years. With the expansion to 16 teams following the addition of Texas and Oklahoma, moving to nine conference games was inevitable.
There will be plenty of debate on balancing scheduled and protecting traditional rivalries moving forward for the three protected games. It's unknown when a decision on that will come, but it is known, and obvious, that two of the three for Alabama will be Auburn and Tennessee. Neither the Iron Bowl nor The Third Saturday in October is going anywhere.
The debate will come down to the third protected rivalry. For Alabama fans under 30 - and plenty of college football pundits - the answer is obviously LSU. It's an understandable answer, albeit the wrong one. The answer lies about 84 miles west of Tuscaloosa.
Alabama's third permanent rival should be Mississippi State
Pop quiz: If I were to ask you which team Alabama has played more than any other team in the country, what would your answer be? It's not Auburn, Tennessee, or LSU. It's Mississippi State. In fact, outside of Auburn and Georgia, it's the second most-played game in SEC history.
Alabama and Mississippi State have met on the gridiron 108 times. They faced each other in 75 consecutive seasons from 1948 to 2023 before conference expansion took the game away this year and last.
Alabama and Mississippi State are closer together geographically than either Alabama/Auburn or Mississippi State/Ole Miss. It's just an 84-mile drive from Tuscaloosa to Starkville.
It's not a rivalry in the sense that it's been competitive historically. Alabama has won 88 of the 108 all-time meetings, and currently sports a 16-game winning streak against the Bulldogs going back to 2008. Mississippi State fans might not weep if they don't have to play Alabama every year, but most fans in Starkville consider the Crimson Tide their second-biggest rivals outside of Ole Miss.
If being competitive makes for a rivalry, then Alabama and LSU wouldn't be much of one, either. Alabama has won 57 of the 89 meetings between the two programs on the gridiron. The Tide and Bengal Tigers are not traditional rivals, either. That "rivalry" ignited due to Nick Saban, and the fact that consistently during the Saban era, the SEC Western Division was typically decided on a fall Saturday in November when Alabama and LSU met.
But with Saban gone, the Tide and Tigers don't have the same luster they once did. With the SEC doing away with divisions, the game won't feel as significant anymore.
And maybe it will be a rare case for an Alabama/Mississippi State matchup to hold any real significance. But the history of college football has got to matter, no matter all the shiny new changes brought to the sport.