The mighty Southeastern Conference, according to a Birmingham News story this week, dodges teams from other BCS leagues on the road. No BCS conference travels less than the SEC.
Here is a nugget from the News’ story:
"Fifty-six percent of SEC non-conference opponents come from either the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA) or a Football Bowl Subdivision (I-A) school that hasn't had a winning record in at least four years. That statistic looks like this for other leagues: Big East (50 percent), Big Ten (39 percent), Big 12 (38 percent), ACC (38 percent), Pac-10 (32 percent)."
So should the SEC man-up with its non-conference schedule?
Gene Chizik, Auburn
Our opinion is that our league is extremely tough within the league every week. The bottom line is that the people who do the scheduling ... there is always a means to the madness on what they’re trying to get done and what we’re trying to get done. Different schools feel different ways about it.
We like challenging football teams on our non-conference schedule. We’ll play anybody outside our conference if it is the right fit. ... We like the challenge of good football teams and playing some good football teams outside of our conference pretty much every year.
When you schedule, there are a lot of ingredients in there that people maybe don’t necessarily realize in terms of contracts and things. We would love to have eight home games every year ... but we know realistically every year that might not be a possibility. Those are the things that become challenging because a lot of teams are going to want a home-and-home.
Bobby Petrino, Arkansas
We get to play five games a year here in Fayetteville and two games a year in Little Rock. And then we’re in a contract to play in Dallas for the next nine years to play Texas A&M, which helps us a lot in recruiting and helps a lot of the old Southwest Conference guys and the tradition in playing there.
The problem with us is being able to schedule and get home-and-home games since we’re locked into that game with Texas A&M. It’s hard to go out and get somebody who will come and play you, but yet you can’t return the game. There are some challenges that we face because of where we play. We don’t get to play eight home games like a lot of teams in our conference do, or seven, and travel.
-- Ray Glier for the AJC
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