Could Auburn switch divisions from the SEC West to the East? Auburn’s athletic director is going to try and make that happen.
Auburn’s AD wants to leave the SEC West for the East. We have a better solution
Just get rid of divisions entirely.
Photo by Michael Chang/Getty Images
The SEC’s spring meetings are taking place this week in Destin, Fla., and Auburn’s athletic director Jay Jacobs is planning on bringing up the idea of the Tigers’ moving to the East to the conference’s commissioner, Greg Sankey. While Sankey said on Tuesday that the potential move is just “media chatter,” Jacobs made it clear that he would rather see the Tigers play in the East.
“It makes more sense for Auburn from the standpoint of the demographics of our students, not our student-athletes,” Jacobs said via Auburn’s 247Sports affiliate. “Six or eight years ago, I looked at all the demographics. Most of all our students come from Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky, a few from Mississippi, very few from Louisiana.”
This talk isn’t new, especially after Missouri joined the conference in 2012.
SB Nation’s Auburn blog, College and Magnolia, has recently pushed for the move, too.
But one of the biggest issues that may come to fans’ minds is preserving those big cross-divisional rivalries — specifically Auburn-Georgia, Alabama-Tennessee, and Auburn-Alabama. Auburn in the East would mean Bama only playing either Auburn or Tennessee each year.
That could be solved by going to nine conference games (as Nick Saban wants anyway), by moving both Bama and Auburn to the East in exchange for Missouri and Vanderbilt, or via another creative method that we’ll get to later.
Also, the SEC West has been consistently stronger than the East in recent years.
This is quite different from the East-dominating years of the 1990s and early to mid-2000s, with heavy-hitters like Florida and Tennessee being national contenders each season. Jacobs dismissed the notion of Auburn wanting out of the West just to have to an easier schedule.
“You know what, Florida won two national championships,” Jacobs said via 247Sports. “So you can’t schedule based on where you think the easier place is going to be because you end up jumping from the frying pan into the fire. The thing that doesn’t make sense geographically is the Missouri fans, and the travel they have to do.”
Auburn is much closer to the East schools than the West ones, and the reverse goes for Missouri.
But an even better solution would be to do away with divisions completely.
Bill Connelly explained this in his college football campaign proposal on how to fix schedules. Essentially, replace divisions with pods of balanced teams, and give everybody three guaranteed rivals, which can change.
Killing divisions and using pods allows you to:
-maintain your most intense conference rivalries as annual series,
-play everybody within your conference in a short amount of time,
-customize in whatever way works best for your conference (in our collection, we came up with custom rules for each power conference with more than 10 members, and any of those plans could be altered for any other conference as well),
-and establish the most equal possible matchup in your conference title game.
We’ll see if anything actually happens this week or in the coming years with Auburn and the SEC East.
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