Scott Davis: Send us a schedule we can believe in

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Schedule Miser.

Hi there. It’s a pleasure.

I appointed myself the Schedule Miser several years ago, despite being aware that people who give themselves their own nicknames should be whipped in a public place, have their bodies dipped in motor oil and placed on a scaffold in a town square so that others may point and laugh at them. There’s almost never a good reason to give yourself a nickname and to insist that others call you by it.

Still, I did it. I did it because someone had to. Because we desperately needed a Schedule Miser, someone to talk some sense into University of South Carolina and Southeastern Conference administrators who put together the annual football schedules.

Those schedules have been driving me insane on a yearly basis for three decades.

I won’t waste your entire weekend by forcing you to reread all of the columns I’ve written across the years about football schedules and how they’ve been designed to make me roll into a fetal position while sobbing uncontrollably. Just know there have been a lot of them.

In the many years I’ve been writing for Gamecock Central, I’ve whined about South Carolina’s mystifying fixation for scheduling games that cannot help and can only hurt our school (such as against the Pirates of East Carolina). I’ve wondered why South Carolina hadn’t joined the nation’s marquee programs in trying to schedule more interesting non-conference games instead of snoozefests against the likes of Akron and Eastern Illinois.

And more than anything else, I have cursed, cussed and cried about the SEC’s division-heavy scheduling format, which had the strange effect of rendering some of the league’s teams next of kin and others distant cousins twice removed, with little rhyme or reason to the distinctions. It’s a system that had Missouri (which borders Iowa, Illinois and Kansas) playing in the SEC East, and Auburn (just over 100 miles from Atlanta) playing in the SEC West.

For some reason, South Carolina has been playing Texas A&M – a team with which it has no history or cultural similarities – every season for much of the last decade, while playing the Ole Miss Rebels just once in the 2010s. For a long stretch during the previous decade, you were more likely to see Clemson playing Auburn than South Carolina (which would be fine if Clemson were not in another conference entirely).

We used to meet up with Arkansas once a year. Now it’s closer to once in a generation. Neither scenario made sense.

At a certain point, the Schedule Miser always believed, there was little reason to have a conference if many of its teams weren’t playing each other all that often. The end result was a league that in many ways felt like more of a loose alliance – sort of like a pickup YMCA basketball club where the teams are made up of a rotating cast of guys that includes whoever shows up on Saturday mornings – rather than an actual conference.

But now the league is gearing up for its annual spring meetings in Destin, Florida.

And there are rumblings that big changes are in the offing.

Could this be the time to finally set things right?

Could, at long last, the Schedule Miser have reason to retire? We can only hope so.

Welcome to the Neighborhood

Why are the winds of change blowing through the league at this moment? It’s because soon enough, the SEC will be opening its arms to welcome Texas and Oklahoma to the neighborhood.

And when the Sooners and Longhorns settle in to unpack and establish themselves in mansions inside the nation’s premier subdivision, they’ll encounter the same folks that we all encounter when we move into a new address: They’ll have Next-door Neighbors and Barely Know ‘Em’s.

As things now stand, South Carolina football is affiliated with quite a few Next-door Neighbors (your Georgias, your Floridas), and several Barely Know ‘Em’s (Arkansas, the Mississippi schools, etc.) They also inexplicably have multiple Acquaintances Who Live All the Way on the Back End of the Subdivision, and I Really Don’t Know Them At All, But for Some Reason We Carpool to Work Together Every Day teams who show up on the schedule each year (Texas A&M, Missouri).

The hope and the dream is that we’ll see South Carolina play a few of its SEC brethren more often, and a few of them less often (and if there’s a decision to take Texas A&M off the schedule forever, into eternity, let it be known that I’m fine with it).

That hope and that dream might be coming true. And with it, the Schedule Miser might be out of a job.

Hallelujah.

Breaking Down the Options

According to multiple reports, a sane approach to scheduling could be lurking in the future.

If you need some background on the options currently on the table, I encourage you to start with this complete rundown in Sports Illustrated (SEC football schedule: Inside the debate around its future), then check out Gamecock coach Shane Beamer’s thoughts about the proposals here (South Carolina coach Shane Beamer sees pros in multiple schedule ideas).

What appears to be almost a certainty is that the division format will be guillotined, and while I would hate to lose a yearly game against Georgia or Tennessee, I’d have no problem – none whatsoever – saying goodbye to that annual matchup against Mizzou. Besides, the driving point behind these proposals is that all of the league’s teams would be playing each other regularly instead of once a decade, so if matchups against Missouri are what you crave most in life, there should always be one right around the corner.

Of course, it wouldn’t be college football if we didn’t mix in some wildness and wooliness with the new, rational approach to scheduling. ESPN reported this week that the SEC might flirt with creating its own league-only playoff in future seasons (Could the SEC stage its own college football playoff?), effectively walling itself off in its own castle and daring the rest of the sport’s teams to try to cross the moat and storm the gates.

The idea sounds undeniably wacky on first blush…and yet for some reason I find myself smiling at the thought of it. Remember how enjoyable that SEC-only COVID season was? There’s something to be said for controlling your destiny, after all, and just pretending that the rest of college football didn’t exist at all.

I’m not sure how the Schedule Miser would feel about an SEC-only playoff, tempting as that thought may be.

But hopefully he will have already been retired before we can find out.

Tell me what you think about the scheduling proposals by writing me at [email protected].

Discuss South Carolina football on The Insiders Forum​