On one level, I'm sad that this happened. The last 20 years have been a golden age for the SEC, especially in football, and the Asperger's side of my brain was quite pleased by the symmetry and consistency of following a 12-team league with six teams in each division. Now I have to get used to a whole new set of scheduling issues, and that is annoying.
But I'm not as upset about this development as I would have been 15 or 30 years ago. When I was a kid, I was always disgusted that middle-aged sportswriters weren't just as furious about changes in the sports world as I was, and I assumed that they were a bunch of hacks who didn't really care about the integrity of the game. I still think that may have been the case, but I also realize something else: by the time you get to middle age, there have already been so many changes to the sports world you grew up in that other changes don't seem like a big deal. To me, adding A & M to the SEC doesn't seem nearly as strange as adding South Carolina did back in the early 1990's. In fact, I don't think it's as big a deal as the departure of Georgia Tech -- one of the founding members -- back in the mid-1960's.
I've also spent enough time thinking about college football to understand that from time to time, the structure of the game adjusts to take into account demographic changes in the country. In my lifetime, the biggest demographic change affecting college football has been the economic growth of the South relative to the rest of the country. As Southern states have gained money and population, they have poured these new resources into college football -- thus creating the dominant SEC of today.
That dominance -- combined with the poor economic conditions of the last 10 years -- have put a tremendous strain on the system. Other schools and conferences are scrambling to react, trying to put together new combinations that will increase their economic firepower, and thereby make them more competitive. I know enough about the South -- and the hyper-competitive types who drive the SEC -- to know that the SEC will never voluntarily sit still and let other groups get an advantage over them. So it was inevitable that the SEC would respond to the moves of other conferences (the Big 10 adding Nebraska, the Pac-10 adding Colorado and Utah) with a move of its own.
On the whole, I think the move they made -- letting in A & M -- was the best move that they could have made. Florida State may have been a better fit for the SEC, and I have always wanted to bring Georgia Tech back home, but neither of those schools has shown much interest in leaving the ACC. A & M, on the other hand, is a very solid academic school with a long and proud football tradition, and they really wanted to be with the rest of us. I think that is enormously important. A big part of the SEC's success rests on the fact that the various SEC fan bases share very similar attitudes toward college sports, which has always resulted in a combination of intense competition on the field and a healthy willingness to work together off the field. From that perspective, I think A & M will be a great fit for the league.
From a UK basketball perspective, it's too early to know exactly what this will mean. The SEC has decided to get rid of the basketball divisions, so we were going to be looking at a new schedule anyway. A & M has never been that interested in basketball, and while they have gotten better in recent years, it is unlikely that they will turn into the next Florida. My guess is that A & M will be another Mississippi State -- really annoying when you play them, but not a team that you think about most of the rest of the time. It will be interesting to see if A & M tries to convince the rest of the league to play the SEC Tournament in Houston, but outside of that, my guess is that we will see very little fallout from this development.
If we add a 14th team, of course, that could change. But it's too early to speculate about that.
I still can't believe the NFL expanded to Tampa, Fla.
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