By Hunt Palmer
Rivalries stir emotions.
Sports create passion and intensity that can elicit the highest highs and evoke the lowest lows. Ultimately, the opponent that creates that despair can become a villain. LSU fans young and old remember where they were when Alabama delivered heartbreaking defeats 10 months apart in 2012.
They’ll never forget. And that’s what makes the rivalry.
For some fans a little bit older, it’s the wild theatrics LSU-Auburn has produced—cigars, leverage, overturned pass interference or interceptions, five of them to be exact.
Maybe it’s Steve Spurrier’s Florida teams or Bear Bryant owning Tiger Stadium.
Since LSU doesn’t have a true rival, five different LSU fans might have a different team or three that makes his or her skin crawl.
Generally speaking, those teams reside in the SEC.
Conference rivalries have been the backbone of college sports for a century. And they’re being lowly-but-surely eliminated year-over-year. Oklahoma-Nebraska was once the pinnacle of the sport. No longer. Oklahoma doesn’t play Oklahoma State anymore, either. Washington-Washington State and Oregon-Oregon State fell apart when the Big Ten poached the two larger state schools.
Texas and Texas A&M didn’t play for over a decade until Greg Sankey reunited them.
I say all of that to enforce that I truly appreciate deep-seeded rivalries in college sports.
And in the same breath, the SEC needs to go get North Carolina, Clemson and Florida State and rip the ACC and all of its rivalries to shreds.
Why? Same reason for almost every change in college athletics the last 20 years—money.
The ACC is doomed.
Its flagship schools are filing lawsuits to try to get out from under an albatross of a media rights deal. Its chancellors and athletic directors are speaking of departures in whens not ifs. Reports surfaced last week that North Carolina is eyeing the SEC, and that’s a positive for all the teams in the league.
Furthermore, failing to add the big ACC programs would be a massive negative for the league, because the only alternative would be the Big Ten which would at that point become a truly national conference spanning to all four corners of the continental United States with a stranglehold on both coasts and the Midwest.
That geographic reach creates all kinds of bargaining power at the television negotiating table. Those gains are no longer just for coaches’ salaries and fancy locker rooms. That revenue is shared directly with the players.
Right now, the power athletic programs are sharing just north of $20 million annually with players. If the SEC were to stand pat while the Big Ten expanded, it’s easy to envision a world where the Big Ten, even with more pieces of the pie to separate, creates a gap of $10 to $15 million or more between itself and the SEC. Now, all of a sudden, college athletics has the Dodgers (2025 Payroll: $340mm) in Columbus, OH., and the Twins (2025 Payroll: $145mm) in Baton Rouge.
That issue, which is going to cause a work stoppage in Major League Baseball in two years, should be far more troubling to the LSU fan than pulling Auburn off the schedule and adding Florida State.
Last year was the first year LSU and Mississippi State didn’t play in football since 1925. Same goes for Auburn since 1991. Instead, the Tigers played Oklahoma, Texas A&M and South Carolina. None of those teams were in the SEC 35 years ago. And all of those games were great theatre.
In a short span of 12 years, the sparks of LSU and Texas A&M’s rivalry have been stoked.
LSU has had some run ins with the ACC’s big boys in the past. The 2020 College Football Playoff final with Clemson, just about every matchup in Omaha with Florida State and Tyrann Mathieu’s coming out party in the Chick-Fil-A Kickoff in 2010 come to mind on the positive side.
Season openers against Jordan Travis, a season-closer against Tyler Hansbrough’s juggernaut, the 2024 Chapel Hill Regional and a matchup with Tahj Boyd’s Clemson squad in the 2013 Chick-fil-A Bowl didn’t go so well.
But bring it on. And the money that will come with it.
Labor Day weekend will have all the intensity of a conference rivalry at Clemson. Hopefully it’s a harbinger of things to come.
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