Analyst’s Auburn scheduling solution would keep marquee matchup yearly
One of the annual staples of the Auburn football program’s schedule, the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry game against the Georgia Bulldogs, is in danger of being lost as the SEC potentially moves to a 1-7 schedule that gives every SEC school one fixed rivalry game and seven bi-annually rotating rivals. The conference is currently holding its annual spring meetings in Destin, Florida to figure out what the conference will look like when Texas and Oklahoma join in 2024.
Opelika Auburn News’ Justin Lee has a solution that would keep the yearly matchup between AU and UGA that would simultaneously keep the game on the television schedule and keep TV executives at CBS and ESPN happy, though.
“Auburn and Georgia can simply schedule a Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry game as a non-conference game in the years it rotates off the conference schedule,” Lee wrote. “It has happened before: North Carolina and Wake Forest are another two schools with an ancient annual rivalry, with 110 meetings between them. In the 2010’s, when the ACC stopped scheduling them to play annually, they scheduled a non-conference home-and-home for 2019 and 2021. In 2020 and 2022, they were in-conference, and in 2019 and 2021, it just didn’t count for the conference standings.”
Auburn football cannot lose Georgia as an annual rival
It may seem masochistic to some to want to keep the two-time defending College Football Playoff National Champion Dawgs on the schedule, but the Auburn football fandom has embraced being the David to the sport’s greatest Goliaths, and at this point, Georgia is the biggest bad guy out there. Losing such a deeply-rooted historic rivalry literally called the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry would lose money for the Plains, Athens, and as Lee pointed out, would deceive future recruits and students who looked forward to that game in particular.
Auburn cannot lose Georgia as a rival, and the SEC likely knows this. Lee’s solution sounds simplest, especially with precedent from two of the Tar Heel State’s many ACC programs already being established. But whatever Greg Sankey and Co. come up with better not disturb the piece for the conference’s proudest programs.