(10-02-2019 12:24 PM)Wedge Wrote:  Staples: It’s time to fix SEC scheduling, and one solution stands above the rest

Quote:Auburn coach Gus Malzahn said something this week that drove home a point Florida coach Dan Mullen made last week.

“This will be my first time to ever go to Florida,” Malzahn said of the Tigers’ visit this Saturday to The Swamp. “I’ve been to every other place in our league but Florida. This will be a first. Looking forward to it. Yeah. That is pretty unique.”

Malzahn didn’t say this to point out anything about the SEC’s conference scheduling format, but Mullen did. He brought it up unprompted last week when discussing Florida’s schedule. “I think we should mix up the league schedule more, to be perfectly honest with you,” Mullen said during his Monday news conference. “If you look over the next six years, I think we play Miami three times, Florida State six times, South Florida three times, Mississippi State once. So who is the SEC team? I think it’s an injustice for the kids. We should mix those games up and play more teams from the West.”

The solution that Staples suggests is from the article below (which also contains proposals for the ACC, Big Ten, and Pac-12):

https://www.bannersociety.com/2019/8/15/...pod-system

Quote:We researched this system, along with others in this post, in 2016. We found that the 14 conference schedules were close to even in difficulty, based on 10-year S&P+ ratings. If we did the same research in just about any other recent year instead, the schedules would grade out about the same. There’s also little difference in difficulty for anybody between even- and odd-numbered years.

Oh, and the SEC doesn’t have to give up its eight-game schedule.

No argument here. The problem has always resided with the NCAA divisional requirements and to a lesser extent in Tuscaloosa with the AD. Saban has been for change as well.