From Kirby Smart to Nick Saban, SEC coaches offer mostly noncommittals on future scheduling, so what's the holdup here?

MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — The SEC’s future schedule is the topic de jour at the 2023 Spring Meetings this week, and while commissioner Greg Sankey has expressed optimism that league is “poised” to make a final decision by Friday, you wouldn’t know the conference is anywhere close to a consensus after listening to a slew of coaches Tuesday. 

“I’m a history teacher by trade and every time I come to these meetings I’m blown away that the 13 colonies actually formed a union,” Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz said. 

“We can’t agree on an eight- or nine-game schedule, so how did we come together to defeat the British?”

One wonders. And yet, after hearing from the majority of the league’s coaches Tuesday, is it a case of “coming together” or actually caring at all?

Never has a group of such opinionated powerbrokers suddenly decided they no longer had strong thoughts on such a newsworthy topic. The build-up to a scheduling debate that has drug on for more than two years was expected to be contentious this week in Destin, but after all the non-answers and caviler attitudes from some of the league’s top coaches Tuesday, it sure seems like the SEC looks destined to continue kicking the can down the road.

Aside from Drinkwitz, who was the lone voice of reason strongly advocating for the nine-game slate, almost all of the coaches who took talked Tuesday offered what essentially amounted to noncommittal shrugs about the entire ongoing ordeal. 

“Just give us our marching orders,” Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze said. 

“I’m just listening. I’m open to whatever they think is best,” Texas A&M head coach Jimbo Fisher said.

Georgia’s Kirby Smart, who was believed to be in the camp supporting the nine-game model, dubbed the entire debate “the most overrated conversation there ever was.”

“Four years you’ll play everybody, home and away,” Smart said.

“I get it, traditional rivalries, you have three, you have two, you have one, you’ve got this, you’ve got that. You guys need something to write about bad when you start talking about this. It’s just not that big of a deal. You have to win your games to advance.”

Welcome to the SEC, where something that somehow still can’t be decided is also somehow not a big deal to the league’s reigning back-to-back national champion head coach. Vanderbilt’s Clark Lea concurred with Smart, saying, “If it’s eight, that’s great. If it’s nine, that’s great. Make a schedule, and put the football down and let’s play. That’s the mindset of our program.”

Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin went so far as to admit that the coaches barely even discussed the scheduling topic Tuesday, choosing to address other more pertinent — NIL, transfer portal, tampering, gambling, etc — matters.

Well then that settles it, right? Time to call a vote on the 3-6 model because it is the most sensible solution? Enough with the BS and all the intellectually disingenuous excuses like logistical problems (i.e. canceling future non-conference games) or inequity with some team’s permanent rivals. The money issue will be addressed one way or another.

But alas. 

While Greg Sankey seems to prefer the nine-game model, there are still enough voices behind the scenes — namely a group of united ADs making up several of the lower revenue teams in the league (Kentucky, South Carolina, Arkansas, Mississippi State) — who continue to ardently push for an eight-game (1-7 model). 

And that’s where this debate seems to have hit pause again.

While other SEC coaches voiced varying thoughts on the schedule, the consensus among the group is that the decision isn’t really up to them.

Alabama’s Nick Saban, who for years pinned for more SEC games vs. SEC teams, is displeased with the Tide’s rumored three permanent rivals. But when asked for his latest eight- versus nine-game thoughts, Saban mostly hemmed and hawed, initially bringing up the league’s media right’s deal — the SEC’s $800 million TV deal with ESPN was agreed upon before Texas and Oklahoma — before making a larger point about wanting “balance” for teams in the league who schedule difficult non-conference games. 

“Whatever happens, happens,” Saban said before adding, “I think one of the more difficult things with going to nine games is we’ve tried to schedule two out-of-conference, Power 5 games to try to improve our strength of schedule.”

After recently complaining to Sports Illustrated about Alabama’s future schedule, Saban opted to pass on any hard public stance either way. He never mentioned having to play LSU, Auburn or Tennessee every season in the future — something the Tide already does anyways.

“Over the next, I don’t know, seven, eight, nine, 10 years, and if we go to nine games, we’ll have to unwind that. So my deal was always play more SEC games because we couldn’t get other people to schedule. Now I think there’s more people in tune to scheduling, so having a balance is probably the most important thing.”

Unwind away, then.

This should not be this hard, and yet it seems like we’re still a ways away from “landing the plane” on a debate that’s already lasted far too long.

Several coaches, from Smart to Freeze to Florida’s Billy Napier pondered the impact of the league’s future scheduling on the expanded 12-team College Football Playoff. Smart wondered if all the fuss was over the wrong topic — not eight vs. nine but what about the idea of being better off not making the SEC championship?

“That’s a lot better topic to me,” Smart said. “I’m looking at it more as a competitive disadvantage of you might have to play one or two weeks later (in the Playoff) after just playing that game, which will be your most physical game you play all year.”

Meanwhile, Freeze and Napier touched on strength of scheduling, raising potential concerns about the College Football Playoff “metrics” and how the future committee would view SEC teams with multiple losses thanks to more difficult schedules. 

“From a football coach’s perspective, the biggest question I would have is: As important as those games are to us, how does the playoff look at it? If you’re an SEC opponent and you’re really quality and you’ve won a lot of good games, but you dropped two to top teams, or a third one, do you still get in when the playoff expands,” said Freeze, who otherwise pushed any scheduling opinions to his AD and school president. 

Napier echoed a similar sentiment, rhetorically asking, “Is the strength of schedule going to be weighed in a fashion that would benefit the SEC to play nine games?

“How do these decisions ultimately affect our ability to get into the tournament?”

All are interesting points, but they aren’t central or critical to the ultimate eight versus nine-game debate. They’re more unanswerable questions that will only further slow a final decision.

Nine games is what makes sense. Nine games is what Sankey wants. Sankey believes the SEC is at the forefront of college athletics, but it won’t be if punts on a nine-game model for even just the 2024 season. 

If the SEC — with 16 teams in 2024 — doesn’t adopt a nine-game model, it would be the only Power 5 conference to do so. 

“I don’t think that’s a good look for our conference,” Drinkwitz said. 

“But with the high turnover of our jobs, it’s hard to have any vision other than what’s right in front of us for the next six months.

“The SEC is the best conference in college football because of the passion of its fans. I think you run the risk of losing that with the shortsightedness of, well this schedule isn’t fair for me if I have to play (whoever). 

“The reality of it is persevering the primary and secondary rivalries in this league is important to the league and important to the fanbase now more than ever with the competition for dollars and passion of the sport. You move too far away from that, you open the door for fans to travel to other venues for entertainment.”

Eli Drinkwitz, a much-needed voice of reason on the topic, but does it even matter?

If so many league coaches truly don’t have strong opinions on where the schedule lands, then Sankey ought to put his finger on the scale and make sure enough ADs do land on a decision that will continue to make the SEC the top conference in the sport.