In a word…

• The boys give their long-overdue final thoughts on this past season.

• Following a brief discussion of the ACC’s demise (and a mild defense of its historical competitiveness), Burt reveals a very steamy fantasy about one possible future for the SEC.

• To all you loyal readers out there…What would you like to hear about this offseason? Would you like a special edition on the Masters?? Respond to this email and let us know!

• Finally, if you’re liking what we’re putting down, don’t be afraid to share us out! Any friends and family who share our Saturday Sickness can subscribe here.

The Boys’ Final Word on the 2024 Season

BurtReynolds69:

The bastards did it…They got what they wanted…Ohio State made the investment, they kept a talented, veteran core intact, and they finally broke through in the playoffs, winning their first national title since ole’ 12-Gauge (Cardale Jones) bagged ‘em one in 2014 and proving, without any shadow of a doubt, that they were the best team in college football last season. For me, it has to go down as a success for the inaugural 12-team playoff, which produced two great semifinal games, and ended with a clearly dominant team lifting the trophy. That format will continue to see tweaks over the coming seasons: do we begin re-seeding teams following the opening round so that the undefeated 1 seed (Oregon this past year) doesn’t draw the toughest matchup (Ohio State) in round one? Do we expand the field to 14 to satiate (good luck with that!) the SEC’s and the Big Ten’s desire for global domination? Either way, I think the model has already been proven out. It produced an indisputable champ who earned it on the field. Now, how do the SEC heavies respond to a second-consecutive non-SEC national champion? THAT will be a fun storyline as we head into next season…

Badger Bill:

What’s left to say about the champs? Ohio State spent the money, started #2…and finished #1. How this team lost multiple games—particularly a 13-10 smothering at home at the hands of a five-loss Michigan—is more astonishing than had they just gone undefeated. The Buckeyes got it done though, bringing another natty to Columbus, a place that measures its success in trophies. That gets the monkey off the back of head man Ryan Day, and a big raise to boot. With both coordinators off to greener ($$$) pastures and 15 starters to replace, 2025 will be a new dawn in Columbus. But at least now they don’t have to look so damn miserable all the time. Well, not until 2026 at least. As we look in the rearview, the story of 2024 isn’t the team at the mountain top, but the broken remnants of the SEC, avalanched to the bottom. What in the good lawd’s name is going on down south?? Back to back Big Ten titles. No championship game appearances. Hell, hardly a whiff of the final four. I have no doubt that noted country act Kirby & Sark will have their respective teams in the thick of it in 2025, but with a long list of new quarterbacks, it’s Georgia, Texas, and a heaping mess of everyone else. At least my ears have started to recover from constantly hearing that stupid fucking S-E-C chant for going on two decades now. Or maybe they’re just saving that for March? It just means more (buckets) in a #BasketballConference.

Dr. Chim Richalds:

Sure, give the deep pockets of Ohio State their flowers. They set out with the goal of winning a championship, and they did so for the low, low price of $20 million big ones. Last time I purchased natty, I got 24 of ‘em for 10 bucks! Inflation’s a bitch…But the Buckeyes and the rest of the Big 10 showed that they’re the conference to beat, and the reign of the SEC ends—for now. Having had a bit of time to digest the season, I truly believe the expanded playoff is a winner, albeit in need of some adjustments. You just can’t go into next year with the same set of rules after watching the 12-team bracket play out like it did. Yes, the regular season still matters bigly, but conference championships, in the current state of affairs, don’t mean shit. Don’t wanna be too “old man yells at cloud” over here, but those games should be important! They should matter. We shouldn’t be in a situation where teams that lose conference championship games get better seeds than teams that won them (SMU somehow received a better seed than a Clemson team who’d beat them just days before), and we certainly need to do away with the whole “top four conference champs get automatic byes” bit. I don’t know what the exact fix is, but I hope there’s change. Here’s to a quick offseason! Now, Dr. Chim has some remedial summer school courses to take in order to keep hold of that Brazilian medical license...Go Dawgs!

The Boxslayer:

::Crickets::

Red Hot Feature: Burt's SEC Fantasy

By BurtReynolds69

It’s no secret that I—alongside virtually every other FSU (and Clemson, and Miami, and any honest North Carolina) fan—have been clamoring for my ‘Noles to get the hell up out of the poorly-steered, poorly-promoted, withering ACC in favor of either the SEC or Big Ten, which together comprise the “Power Two” cartel of modern college sports.

Now, is that consolidation great for the college landscape? No. But it’s happening, and it’s being driven by the differential media values of the large universities with huge, devoted fanbases and the smaller schools who draw less consumer attention. In many ways, it sucks. But it’s the American way, folks…It’s capitalism…Now that there’s literally billions of dollars involved, I’m not sure we can un-ring that bell.

You can blame FSU’s public grandstanding—or the Seminoles’ inconsistent play over the past decade (though you should blame Miami…bums haven’t done a damn thing since joining more than 20 years ago)—for the ACC’s predicament, but the harsh reality is that the conference’s fate was sealed through multiple decades of slow-footed, unimaginative, “let’s have a bourbon on the back porch” leadership, as well as the Tobacco Road brass’ acceptance of an increasingly damaging “partnership” with ESPN, who has more or less openly aided and abetted the ACC’s descent to a second-class conference. The four-letter network has made its long-term college sports bet on the SEC—who could blame them?—and their programming reflects that: When’s the last time you heard ESPN say anything positive about the ACC? That’s not a rhetorical question…

For instance, were you aware that in 2023—the year an undefeated and absolutely stacked (check the draft results…check this year’s NFL All-Rookie Team…) Florida State squad was left out of the college football playoff in favor of Alabama and Texas teams with losses on their records (both of whom promptly lost in the semifinals)—the ACC, who plays more out-of-conference games against the SEC than does any other league, actually had a winning record against the SEC?? I bet you weren’t! ESPN certainly never mentioned it!! Were you aware that, with its two straight natties over the past two seasons, the Big Ten only just tied the ACC for second-most national titles since the turn of the century?? I bet not!! Even in basketball, long Tobacco Road’s cherished son and a well-earned point of pride for the ACC, the “well the ACC is clearly down this year” and the “man the SEC has really made strides in basketball!” start early every season and have been flying around on Bristol’s airwaves for what seems like a decade now, despite the ACC cleaning up in the postseason every god damn year! (ACC boys, you know exactly what I’m talking about, and before the SEC, it was the Big 12, and before that, it was the Big East. Bizarre behavior from a business “partner.”) The ACC is a perpetual punchline, even when the results dictate that it shouldn’t be.

But I digress! No one really wants to read about the ACC—which is kinda the whole point here…—and ABSOLUTELY no one wants to hear me re-litigate the FSU snub…I know that. So the point I want you to remember is this: ESPN is all in on the SEC and its long-term success, while their strategy vis-a-vis the ACC is essentially to juice the asset—at a highly favorable valuation for ESPN—for as long as they’re allowed. To put it in more practical terms, whereas ESPN has every intention of airing Alabama-Georgia and Texas-Oklahoma games in 2040, they’re “partners” with the ACC like Tony Soprano’s “partners” with the guy who owns the sporting goods store but owes Tony $100k in gambling debts: They don’t care about the long-term health of the business, they just care that they can draw something out of it in the near term (as ESPN/Disney sheds weight from their bloated, over-extended behemoth of a business). Right now, ESPN owns the ACC’s media rights at a very nice discount—on the order of $40 million less per school, per year!—relative to the SEC, so when they show a Clemson game, or an FSU game, or a Miami game, and those teams draw SEC-level eyeballs, ESPN is paying way less to make similar revenues in advertising. There’s the rub. ESPN does nothing to boost the media rights value of the ACC’s smaller brands like Wake Forest and Boston College (they don’t see a long-term play there), while cashing in on the relatively high and inelastic (there’s that economics degree folks!) revenue-generating potential of the conference’s best brands. I want to be crystal clear about this: I’m not alleging a vast conspiracy here…these are obvious monetary incentives out in the open for all to see.

So this has all been a very long, meandering way of saying that the ACC in its current iteration is unsustainable, and that there are attractive media rights entities in the league that, once they’re able to free themselves from their current contractual arrangements, will command attention from the Power Two. This will happen at some point, whether in 2026 or 2031.

In the scenario I’d like to explore today (Jesus, Burt! Finally!)—my favored scenario as a Florida State fan—the SEC moves to defend its territory from Big Ten incursion (the motivation for which we’ll cover in our next edition), bringing into the fold Florida State, Clemson, Miami, and North Carolina. In doing so, the SEC officially locks down the huge and growing market (and recruiting hotbed—the importance of this really cannot be overstated) of Florida, pulls in another blueblood and recent national title winner in Clemson, and opens up new territory by drawing in the premier brand in another rapidly growing sun belt state, North Carolina. Perhaps most importantly, it keeps its only remaining competitor out of the South, which the SEC has long and fairly successfully argued—and will want to continue to argue—is the only college football region that truly matters.

With that in mind, you could argue that this article is just a nice chunk of red meat for our sizable contingent of FSU-crazed readers. I guess you’re not completely wrong there. But to me, it’s also some pretty fucking succulent red meat for anyone curious as to what the conference landscape might look like in five years. And for a fan of a current SEC team, just imagine these matchups. Imagine the more sensible regional appeal—relative to the current setup that saw, for example, South Carolina play not one conference foe located east of Alabama—this setup would produce within the league.

So I had a couple Yuenglings one night, and I broke this theoretical 20-team SEC into four divisions, based both on geography and competitive balance. This is what I came up with, and I even did some free branding work for Sankey and the boys in Birmingham! Check it out:

"The Low Country” aka "Wild Things"

• Florida
• Auburn
• Florida State
• Miami
• South Carolina

"The Piedmont” aka “Deliverance”

• Georgia
• Clemson
• Tennessee
• Kentucky
• North Carolina

"The Deep South” aka “PigglyWigglyVille”

• Alabama
• LSU
• Ole Miss
• Mississippi State
• Vanderbilt

"The Midlands” aka “The Big 12”

• Oklahoma
• Texas
• Texas A&M
• Arkansas
• Missouri

Come on now…How steamy is that?? Read through it again. Can you imagine how intense these divisional battles—with likely auto-bids to the playoff on the line—would be?? And check out how much sense this alignment makes geographically—the Low Country’s in green, the Piedmont in blue, the Deep South in red, and the Midlands in gold (again, with some phenomenal free branding from the boys/Microsoft Word):

From a scheduling standpoint, it’s pretty simple: Each team plays every other team in its division once, and then each division is paired with one other division for a given season (rotating each year), with all of their teams also playing one another once. This makes four divisional games and five “partner” division games, producing a conference schedule of 9 games. 

In my proposal, the SEC moves to a 10-game conference schedule, allowing the league to protect some of its most storied rivalries. For example, Alabama-Auburn (the Iron Bowl) and Georgia-Florida (the Cocktail Party) both become “protected” rivalries, as does Clemson-South Carolina. These games get played every year. For the schools—like newbies Florida State and North Carolina—without obvious protected games, they simply rotate through a different 10th game each season, which could be based on conference standings from the year before (similar to the NFL, where schedules are filled out by pairing bottom dwellers with other bottom dwellers, big dawgs with other big dawgs, and so forth), or could be done randomly. When you look through some of these schedules below, you’ll see why the upper-tier teams might prefer it to be random…Schedules in this SEC would be absolutely brutal.

So let’s throw out a few sample schedules to get a feel for the type of extreme sexiness this setup could produce. Shockingly, I’ve chosen to profile Georgia and Florida State (that’s right haters!), and what the hell…we’ll throw in Alabama. In each, we’ve peppered in a couple hypothetical out-of-conference games to fill them out. Might the SEC and Big Ten come to some scheduling arrangement whereby their teams agree to meet at least one foe from the other league each season? Sure. But I also think you can see below why an SEC with these additions might not really want to add even more tough games out of conference—particularly given the league’s historical love for cupcakes (hey-ohh!!!). In this example, the Piedmont has been paired with the Low Country, and the Deep South with the Midlands, and we’ve filled out a 12-game slate with the typical regional Davids:

Georgia Bulldogs

Troy
@ South Carolina
Tennessee
@ North Carolina
Auburn
@ Florida State
@ Kentucky
Florida*
@ Clemson
Miami
@ Arkansas
Georgia Tech

In a little complication that our numbers guys would need to figure out, because Florida’s a protected game for Georgia, Georgia enters the pool of teams needing a 10th conference game. In this hypothetical, they draw the Hawgs. Could’ve just as easily been Vandy, LSU, etc. My ‘Dawgs keep the Bumblenerds at the end of the season to carry a worthy tradition forward.

Florida State Seminoles

Louisiana Tech
Auburn
@ Tennessee
@ Kentucky
North Carolina
Georgia
@ Miami
Ole Miss
@ Clemson
South Carolina
Georgia Southern
@ Florida

Alabama Crimson Tide

Chattanooga
Texas A&M
@ Arkansas
Vanderbilt
@ Ole Miss
Missouri
Oklahoma
@ Mississippi State
@ LSU
Texas
Western Kentucky
@ Auburn*

Alabama’s sample schedule certainly has more of a Western feel to it, but hey, it is what it is. The SEC swallowed the Big 12’s most valuable assets, and the Tide have been playing Arkansas and Texas A&M every season for years now. The schedule still produces a bevy of marquee matchups, and for any ‘Bama fan concerned over its slight Southwest Conference vibe, just know that 1) you’re still getting Auburn and LSU every year and 2) the ‘Tide’s schedule would rotate to the Low Country and the Piedmont over the next two seasons.

Bottom line: If I’m running the SEC, the day the Big Ten plants a big yankee flag squarely in my back yard is—in the words of the always-honest Tommy Tuberville—the day they “carry me out in a pine box” (Tuberville would voluntarily, as a living man, leave Ole Miss for Auburn two days later…). If you keep the Big Ten up north and out west, you can legitimately argue that you’re the only game in town in the only town that matters. Now clearly, college football matters a great deal in the Midwest too, but recent history—the last two seasons notwithstanding—and in particular, Southern schools’ unmatched access to elite native talent and their institutional commitment to competing ($$$) at the highest level, will tell you that the South remains the dominant region in this sport. In our next edition, we’ll contemplate a future Big Ten both with a successful move into the Southeast and without it—and I think you’ll leave convinced that the league, if it wants to win this great-power battle with the SEC, has every incentive to at least attempt such an incursion. Whether the SEC allows it is my million-dollar question.

Now, it’s more than fair to note that I’ve gamed all this out without any consideration for contractual entanglements, inevitable wrangling over per-school revenue splits (newbies may be forced to take a lesser cut of any first contract, for example), or other administrative complications, but who cares about those?! You’re not here for that! And if there’s one thing that seems pretty crystal clear to me given the current state of our world, it’s that one megalomaniac man, if he loves himself enough, can often find a way to do the things he wants to do, regardless of any legal impediments.

SO LET’S GET THIS ON SANKEY’S DESK! ::Joker energy:: Who here knows Greg?! Who knows a guy who knows Greg’s son?! Let’s make this happen!! (And let’s get that asshole subscribed…)