In the SEC football scheduling war, has Kentucky fought the wrong battle?
When No. 1 Georgia (12-0, 8-0 SEC) squares off with No. 8 Alabama (11-1, 8-0 SEC) at 4 p.m. in Saturday’s SEC football championship game, it will mark the end of an era.
The matchup between Kirby Smart’s Bulldogs and Nick Saban’s Crimson Tide will be the final SEC championship game that features the champions of the East (Georgia) and West (Alabama) divisions. Coinciding with the arrival of Oklahoma and Texas into the SEC in 2024-25, the Southeastern Conference is scrapping divisions.
Next year, the SEC championship game competitors will be the teams which finish first and second atop the league’s 16-team standings.
Even though the University of Kentucky is one of four SEC teams that never won a division title after the league split into East and West in 1992, it seems to me UK’s football future would be more secure, for reasons I will explain below, if the division format had been preserved.
In the all-time tally from the division era in Southeastern Conference football, the championship standings break down as follows:
East Division championships: Florida 13, Georgia 11, Tennessee 5, Missouri 2, South Carolina 1, Kentucky 0, Vanderbilt 0.
West Division championships: Alabama 15, LSU 7, Auburn 6, Arkansas 3, Mississippi State 1, Mississippi 0, Texas A&M 0.
SEC championship game victories: Alabama 10, Florida 7, LSU 5, Georgia 4, Auburn 3, Tennessee 2 — with one final, division-era league champ to be determined Saturday night.
As it turned out, the closest Kentucky ever came to winning the SEC East was 2018, when Mark Stoops and troops absorbed a 34-17 loss to Georgia in a game in which the winner was assured a trip to Atlanta to play in the SEC championship game.
In the 32 seasons of divisional play, the Wildcats finished second twice (2018 and 2021), third three times, fourth seven times, fifth 11 times, sixth seven times; and seventh twice.
From 1992 through this season, UK never had a league mark better than 5-3 — and only achieved that twice, in 2018 and 2021.
Over 32 years, a 5-3 conference record only won the East one time — in 2010, when Steve Spurrier and South Carolina claimed a division title for the only time with that mark.
Once it became apparent that the Southeastern Conference football scheduling format was going to undergo radical change coinciding with the arrivals of Texas and Oklahoma, UK has been steadfast in its position that any new SEC schedule include no more than the current eight league games.
Though I understand the rationale behind UK’s stance, I can’t help but wonder if Kentucky football wouldn’t have been better served if Mitch Barnhart and Co. had accepted the ninth league game but fought to preserve the divisional split instead.
Consider: Even after the arrivals of Oklahoma and Texas push the SEC to 16 teams, in a divisional format, UK football would only need to finish ahead of seven other teams to make the league championship game.
In a 16 team uni-division, Kentucky will have to finish ahead of 14 teams to ever play for the SEC championship.
Admittedly, arguing in favor of divisions has seemed out of step with the prevailing sentiment in favor of creating more diversity of scheduling within the league by assuring that all SEC teams face each other within each four-year window.
For my money, assuring more games among all league teams is not worth the cost of what will likely need to be given up to achieve it.
From the UK perspective, more contests against, say, Arkansas and Texas A&M, are not worth it if they come at the expense of fewer games against the teams Kentucky fans most want to beat, say Tennessee and Florida, or fewer games in locations that UK backers can most-easily reach, say Knoxville and Nashville.
The whole polarizing debate that has roiled the SEC over staying at eight league games or moving to nine could have been avoided had the league simply said the dissolution of divisions was not open for discussion.
Put Texas in the West, Oklahoma in the East, make the Longhorns and Sooners permanent cross-division rivals and you would have preserved every meaningful, annual rivalry in the league while also restoring dormant rivalries between Texas and Texas A&M, Texas and Arkansas and Oklahoma and Missouri on an annual basis.
For UK and its fans, the East schedule has provided:
▪ Annual contests with programs of similar competitive profile — Missouri, South Carolina, Vanderbilt — to Kentucky’s.
▪ Three annual foes — Missouri, Tennessee and Vanderbilt — in states contiguous to Kentucky.
▪ Annual games with the flagship universities — Florida and Georgia — from two states whose rich supply of high school talent have long been mined, albeit with varying degrees of emphasis, by UK recruiters.
Potentially giving all that up is why I suspect Kentucky will ultimately regret not doing more to try to convince its SEC brethren to stay divided by East and West.
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