Greg Sankey admits SEC going to one division has been 'a focus'

The SEC is moving closer to a decision regarding the future of its divisional format, and the complete disestablishment of the East and West divisions is looking more likely as we inch closer to 2025’s conference realignment.

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey discussed the process him and other conference officials have undergone to establish a new format, still noting that the final decision is an important ongoing discussion.

“The reality is we’ve looked at 40-plus different scheduling models,” Sankey said. “At present the one that has generated the most interest among our membership would be a single-division model matching the top two teams in our conference championship game in the future.”

The format would follow the same one the Pac-12 Conference adopted to start the 2022 season. Still, Sankey said that even though dissolving the divisions are the most practical way of handling the conference’s expansion in 2025 as of this moment, that doesn’t mean there isn’t potential for an introduction of another model that follows the already pre-set divisions or division format.

One highly rumored option would be the four-division ‘pods’ and have each division winner compete in a four team ‘playoff’ in the same format as the current College Football Playoff.

“I don’t think this quad or pod model had a lot of interest once we dug into the details,” Sankey said. “You’ll recall probably last year at this time I made great news by saying we did look at a format that has our own playoff involved, that you use part of November to advance teams to determine a conference champion that could then play forward. That went into the file folder pretty quickly.

“We’ll focus on the expansion of our conference as the primary starting point for a new scheduling model and continue, I would expect, in our current two-division, 14-team model until that time that expansion of the conference takes place rather than expansion of the playoff format.”

Texas and Oklahoma are set to join the SEC on July 1, 2025. By that time, college football will look a whole lot different, and the SEC is jumping ahead of the game by snatching up two of the most recognizable programs in the NCAA.

Still, with the additions of the Longhorns and Sooners comes its own set of problems – a 16-team conference where, in most seasons, over half of the league will find themselves ranked at some point in the season. It could be easy to get lost in the shuffle in the new SEC’s potential single-division format.