Tag: Big 12

Previewing all Power-4 Conference Championships

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As we said recently, our take on Conference Championships this year is that they don’t matter. It’s not a way of teams ‘settling it on the field’, it’s a money-grab by the conferences. That’s not to say that the winners won’t be over-the-moon and the losers won’t feel the pain of defeat, but there’s not as much skin in the game. And in the SEC Championship Game and B1G Championship Games, which feature Georgia-Texas and Oregon-Penn State, this is particularly the case. All teams play the games extra close, then the Top 4 won’t change. On the other side, it’s jeopardy on steroids in the Big 12 and ACC Championship games though. The loser of the ACC (SMU and Clemson)

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Texas & Oklahoma to come to SEC in 2024

Finally, we know when Texas and Oklahoma are coming the SEC. It will be in 2024. The deal with the Big 12, ESPN and FOX was thrashed out, with Fox – who would lose a bunch of game inventory – including the Red River Shoot-Out in 2024 – being the major losers in the situation – finally coming around to a deal where they would be ‘paid back’ in inventory. I’m sure that FOX also ensured themselves on ‘first pick’ of Texas and Oklahoma’s non-conference games or something like that. Apparently, there was a deal in which the match-up between 2024 and 2027 between Michigan will now start in Ann Arbor and move to Austin three years later. Also, Fox

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USC and UCLA make a B1G move: What does it mean for the SEC?

USC and UCLA managed to usurp the SEC on ‘crap we never saw coming’, when the Trojans and Bruins leaked the news – and then confirmed it – that they were both moving to the B1G in the 2024-25 season.  Although the geography’s a joke, it means that there will be two more college sports superpowers arriving to the Big Ten. For USC, it’s no argument that they are a college football superpower. They’ve been as much of a running joke as Texas has in recent years, but the Trojans won back-to-back Nattys in 2004 and 2005, and should were a Vince Young whisker from winning one in 2006. Oh, and overall they’ve won – or been voted as –

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The SEC Future: How a 3-6 schedule would work

Everyone talked about the new SEC schedule. Regardless of what Greg Sankey would love to say, the SEC is going to follow the Pac-12 – (and Big 12 a few years before that, incidentally), and go for a system where the best two team in the SEC play each other in the SEC Championship Game. And that system would be 9 games, and not 8. One thing’s that’s not going to happen is the ‘1-8 schedule’ (1 permanent rival, and 7 revolving rivals), because that will mean that a lot of key TV assets won’t play each other, not to mention Georgia v Auburn, or Alabama v LSU, and Texas v Texas A&M. There are some people who like the

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100 things that I love about College Football

Kevin Duffey of Saturday Down South wrote an amazing article about 100 things that he loved about college football, and I felt inspired. So here’s a 100 things that I love about college football (including, of course, the SEC!). And this is no particular order. That college football came back after it looked like COVID-19 would shut it all down. College Gameday. That moment when it starts, and you get the ‘Welcome to….” and you take a deep breath and get excited, very quickly. At last, your Saturday is starting. Fox’s show is fine, but Gameday is Gameday. Rivalry games. No.1 best rivalry title? “The Holy War” (Utah vs BYU), although ‘The Civil War’ and “Good, Ole Fashioned-Hate” comes close. “Red

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Is Alabama’s opener with Missouri in jeopardy?

This College Football season has already had a few highlights. We’ve had the return of Miami’s Turnover Chain, revamped and restudded (Miami’s also 2-0, so people are already saying: “IS MIAMI BACK?” (Clue: Yes, until they play Clemson and get beat by 40). There’s the laughter at the Big 12, who seem to be embarrassing themselves at every opportunity. There’s the Big Ten, who have managed to put the train back on the tracks, and frankly, we can’t wait until their match-ups start at the end of October, because More College Football. But there have also been the cancellations or postponements. There’s COVID-19 cases and contact tracing and schools scurrying to make sure that all hell doesn’t break loose. Baylor

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As the SEC season looms, the Big 12 gives us stark news

With the SEC season looming, there are some worrying signals out of the Big 12 that this season won’t be straightforward as we might have hoped. For this Saturday’s start of the Big 12 and ACC seasons, already TCU has postponed its game with SMU, Baylor has postponed its game with Louisiana Tech, and Oklahoma State has done the same with Tulsa. All of the delays have been attributed to COVID-19. The most recent – and most unfortunate – one of these postponements was Louisiana Tech vs Baylor.  Louisiana Tech, based in Ruston, LA, was hard-hit by Hurricane Laura, which took out 90% of the area for 7-10 days, sending athletes scurrying to seek other places to live. That sent COVID

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The Terminator Chronicles: Big Ten/Pac-12 edition

August 11, 2020, the Big Ten and the Pac-12 fired the first missiles. After arguing as to whether the fall college football season should be delayed or not, the conference decided that that was it: They were cancelling fall football. There were words of players practicing at Nebraska and Iowa. There was a sense of hope that everything could get sorted with a player-pushed protest. News of all but Iowa and Nebraska deciding to resist came through yesterday, but they had said there wasn’t a vote. There was. And the red button was pushed. But now, there will be no Game. There will be no bitter battles for weird jugs, trophies and helmets. We won’t be able to jump around, white out,

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Big Ten, Pac-12, ACC are moving to Conference-only games

And so the dominos continue to fall. According to multiple media sources, the Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12 have all decided that they will play a nine-game conference-only season It is an effort to cut down the season and make it work, as well as give schools some wiggle-room if there an outbreak of COVID-19 on teams and campuses. For the SEC a bunch of non-conference games will be affected, including (sadly), Clemson vs South Carolina, Georgia vs Georgia Tech, Louisville vs Kentucky and Florida State vs Florida. Notre Dame have been told that the ACC will accommodate Notre Dame in its own schedule. For the Big Ten the biggest match-ups being lost are Notre Dame’s game with Wisconsin, Penn

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