It may not necessarily be a sad day for college football. It is a sad day for nostalgia, however. Especially in the SEC.
The news of the College Football Playoff expansion has been made official. The immediate reaction from most as to what this means for the sport we love has been very reactionary and frustrating. Some love it, most hate it, and some think the sport as we know it is dead and gone. As is the case with most things the truth is always somewhere in the middle. For now there are positives and negatives to discuss.
Let’s start with the positives because whether you agree with the move to 24 teams or not, there are some. There’s at least one very big one, and that is universal scheduling. As part of the move to an expanded field, the CFP committee will finally force the hand of every team from an A4 conference that will have to play 10 A4 opponents to be eligible for a chance to make the field. That may not seem like a big deal to SEC fans since they are already doing that. But, for the teams in other conferences who bitched and moaned for years about schedule inequities for not playing a nine-game conference slate – looking at you Indiana – it is a massive deal.
There are so many current flaws with the sport of college football, but one of the ones that is much bigger than the current lack of conversations around it would suggest is the schedule. One of the reasons it’s so hard to find adequate leadership and universal parity is because of how many cooks are in the kitchen so to speak when it comes to decision making. Each individual A4 conference is looking out for their own best interest. Each school in those conferences is largely doing the same. And while we may never agree that a nine-game SEC schedule is the same as a nine-game Big Ten schedule, at least the enforcement of playing 10 A4 opponents for every team will provide better guardrails for future scheduling and clearer arguments when it comes time for ranking teams.
Now the bad news, and to be clear there is definitely more than one thing to choose from here. Fans are unsurprisingly upset with this decision because the consumer is once again the last thing that seems to matter to the people making the product. For SEC fans though, the news of expansion means the untimely and surprising end to one of the best traditions this conference, and the sport as a whole, have to offer – the SEC Championship game.
This year’s game in Atlanta will mark the 35th anniversary of the inaugural game in Birmingham, Ala. on a freezing cold night in December of 1992. One of the biggest annual matchups that has yielded countless unforgettable moments will be no more after the 2026 edition.
I don’t want to sound dramatic, but since I just naturally am dramatic, allow me to wax poetic about losing this game. I remember exactly where I was for the first one in 1992. I remember selling a car, so I could afford to go to the epic 2009 installment. And, I remember picking my jaw up off the floor inside the building in 2019 when Joe Burrow ran circles around Kirby Smart’s defense during that iconic completion to Justin Jefferson.
That game matters to a lot of people. It definitely matters to me. Losing it is an unbelievably sad byproduct of an expansion that no one asked for. Sadly, life will go on and we will still watch, and that is why they didn’t ask our permission in the first place.
