The SEC has officially made the move to play nine conference games, with a caveat: each team must schedule one power conference opponent in its non-conference slate.
Could that push the Big Ten into implementing a similar requirement? Maybe.
But what if the two leagues just made everything a bit easier and agreed to a conference-wide challenge like in college basketball? Brian Kelly has already mentioned that idea making the rounds in the SEC’s coaching circles:
This sounds like a great idea if it weren’t for the issue of the Big Ten having 18 teams to the SEC’s 16. That’s definitely a problem, but each conference has several high-paid officials whose job is to figure that out and it isn’t the point of this piece.
So, let’s say the two found a way to make it work. Indiana’s SEC opponent would be obvious: the Kentucky Wildcats.
The foundation of college sports is their regional nature. Teams have historically played nearby opponents because that just made sense and rivalries were developed over time, in and out of conferences. Indiana fans have more feelings about Wisconsin than they do about, say, Washington.
The Kentuckiana region has a pretty storied history between Indiana, Louisville and Kentucky. Those athletic programs have combined for multiple national championships and matchups across multiple sports, with Louisville and Kentucky maintaining an in-state rivalry to this day.
As you travel further and further south in Indiana you’ll find more and more people who really, really care about playing Kentucky and Louisville, with a bit more emphasis on the former.
Indiana and Kentucky used to enjoy a storied rivalry history across multiple sports. Men’s basketball was the most prominent, but the Hoosiers and Wildcats met on the gridiron every single season from 1987-2005 with relatively frequent meetings beforehand. Part of the reason Indiana cared so much about winning national titles in men’s basketball in the 1980s was competing with Kentucky, the ‘87 title tied the Hoosiers and Wildcats at five apiece.
But the football series? Well that was an afterthought. Neither program invested in the sport historically and most of the attention, within the rivalry and in general, was on men’s basketball. That’s different now. Indiana has invested in football like never before and Kentucky has been competing on a higher-level before a recent downturn.
College football has never been bigger nationally or for the two programs. There’s an established history, so matching the two in a Big Ten-SEC challenge would be a no-brainer.
Without that challenge? It’s hard to see a game happening. Kentucky already has a locked-in non-conference rival in Louisville, which fulfills the SEC’s power conference opponent requirement. Now it’ll only have two other non-conference slots in its schedule, it’s hard to imagine the Wildcats adding another power conference foe unless the Big Ten and SEC agree to a scheduling series. Which, you can’t blame them. It’s the same reasoning for Indiana eschewing a power conference foe in its current scheduling arrangement.
But now more than ever, with conferences getting bloated and less regional to boost broadcast deals, athletic departments should lean into existing or dormant historic rivalries. Indiana and Kentucky should schedule as many matchups in as many sports as they can.
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