Mike Slive will be back for another year in the SEC. (Marvin Gentry-USA TODAY Sports)
There is a perception nationwide that the Southeastern Conference has gotten, as the old saying goes “too big for its britches.”
After all, the league won nine of the 16 national championships of the BCS era including seven in a row and actually came with seconds of making it eight consecutive this past January. This past week at the SEC Meetings in Destin, Florida, the league distributed a record $309.6 million dollars among its conference schools. The league has launched its own network that will take to the airwaves on August 14th and will be operated by ESPN.
The SEC is taking the lead in promoting games with the other power conferences in football and is making noises about eliminating those annoying mismatches with FCS schools.
“We have not told our schools that they cannot play FCS schools and we don’t have any plans to tell them that,” said SEC commissioner Mike Slive. “The strength of schedule is based on 12 football games, which means that two-thirds of your strength of schedule is your conference schedule. There’s a lot of focus on the non-conference schedule, but the reality is that the test of the best team is 12 games and two-thirds of those games are in the conference.”
Autonomy was a key watch word among SEC officials at the meetings. That is another reason the college football world seems to believe the Southeastern Conference is getting bigger than the sport itself.
“The areas in which we have asked for autonomy are a series of principles and we’ve had unanimous support for the governance process and the autonomy since we started in our league,” said Slive. “Our coaches today were delighted about the fact that we are focused on the well-being of student-athletes, which is the nexus of each area of autonomy.”
While the SEC is not the only league that wants this, it’s taking the lead. Just this past week a ‘name’ college coach called out the SEC for its desired autonomy with the threat of forming its own division, a Division IV, if it doesn’t get its way.
“They sound like the South during the Civil War,” Central Florida coach George O’Leary toldthe Orlando Sentinal earlier this week. “If they don’t get their way, they’re going to secede and start their own country. … I think college football is in real trouble.
“They’re trying to go the other way and create an even wider gap between the haves and have-nots. I think some of these schools have forgotten where they came from.”
“’It’s not something we want to do,”: Slive said on the final day of the SEC meetings. ‘”We want to the ability to have autonomy in areas that has a nexus to the well-being of student athletes. I am somewhat optimistic it will pass, but if it doesn’t, our league would certainly want to move to a Division IV. My colleagues, I can’t speak for anybody else, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t feel the same way.
“’I’ve been so optimistic that we’re going to stay in Division I that we haven’t sat down and tried to map it out,” Slive said. “But we know that failure to create what we’re trying to create would result in doing something different. How we would construct a Division IV? We haven’t looked in that. We hope everyone realizes we are moving into a new era and this is the way to retain your collegiate model. It would be a disappointment and in my view a mistake not to adapt the model. This is a historic moment. If we don’t seize the moment, we’ll make a mistake.”
One athletic director from outside the Power Five conferences believes the majors will get that flexibility and that a Division IV won’t be needed.
“I think the system will work and that the schools outside the high-resource five conferences that are committed to competing at a high level will still be able to do that,” said Southern Miss AD Bill McGillis.
The SEC wants the NCAA to allow the Big Five conferences to pass legislation with more ease.
College football is now moving into the playoff era, a proposal that Slive has pushed for the past several years, again making the SEC a leader in the movement. Of course, the SEC is not alone in its support for the four-team playoff.
“I believe this is the most significant change in college football and, certainly, the most significant change in the history of postseason football,” said Bill Hancock, the Executive Director of the College Football Playoff. “The biggest difference is the selection committee, instead of the BCS Standings.”
Slive has been credited with many college football innovations including the upcoming playoff.
“A lot of our conversations (about a playoff) track back to when Auburn was left out (of the BCS championship game) in 2004,” said Slive. “We weren’t happy then but the fact is that (starting in 2006) we won seven out of eight. So on balance the BCS system was good for us. But we’re excited about the playoff. The playoff has brought back the excitement of New Year’s Day but now it’s going to be 48 hours long because there will be playoff games on Dec. 31.
“We have a guaranteed SEC-Big 12 matchup in the Sugar Bowl which will be in prime time every year after the Rose Bowl. There are a lot of things about the playoff that excites us.”
A long as Slive is working his magic as commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, look for the SEC to continue to be in the forefront of college football innovations.
