In my last entry, I took a stab at who the permanent opponents would be for each team in the 3-6 schedule model. If you haven't read that yet, go check it that out first.

I got some blowback on Twitter about the permanent opponents. The primary feedback was that I made Auburn's permanent opponents too hard. Based on that, I did make a change. So let's start with my new permanent opponents.

Auburn has dropped LSU for Mississippi State, and Alabama now has LSU as a permanent opponent. Now that folks are feeling better for Auburn and upset for Alabama, we can move on.

From there I decided to map out the entire SEC schedule. Here's my understanding of how the 3-6 model would work. First, you play your three permanent opponents every year (obviously). The permanent opponents rotate home and home every year. Now for the other 12 teams. For this, you need to think about this in a four year cycle. In year one, you will play six teams (in addition to the three permanent opponents for a total of nine SEC games). You have to play three of your rotating opponents at home, and three on the road, to have a balanced schedule. In year two, you don't play any of the six rotating opponents you played in year one. You play the other six teams (again three at home and three on the road). When you get to year three, you go back to the same teams as year one. However in year three, you play at the stadium of the teams you played at home in year one, and vice versa. The same is true when comparing year two to year four. Then, you start all over again.

Once I had my head wrapped around how the 3-6 schedule would function, I thought this wouldn't be too hard. Boy was I wrong, but once I got started on this I just couldn't stop.

This was my process after I already had all of the permanent opponents lined up.

First up I had to assign the six rotating opponents to each school in two groups (this was a lot harder than I thought it would be). I initially grouped teams in to four team pods, basically seeded like an NCAA Tournament Sweet Sixteen, to make this easier. But when you have to remove the three permanent opponents from each school's schedule, and then make sure each team has their six slots filled with no duplicates anywhere, that didn't help as much as I thought it would. I eventually figured it out, but I quickly found a problem.

While the schedules I'd created would work within the concept of the model, they were a little wonky. Some schools had a really hard year followed by an easier year. I wanted more balance. At that point I basically re-applied my seeding concept. I had to use something to rank the teams, so I used career winning percentage. That gave me this:

Now, I can already hear your reaction. "Tennessee and Texas get a 1 seed!?!?" I know, I know. But here's the thing: I had to use something. College football is cyclical, and if this schedule is going to be around for the long haul (insert eye roll emoji), this should work. Also, I wanted to use something that I couldn't introduce my personal bias with. For example, a Florida fan would do this using only winning % post 1990.

So from there, I added up the seed of each school's opponents per season to get a difficulty score. The lower the difficulty score for a season, the harder the schedule. I tried to get each season for each school as close to the average difficulty score as I could without major variances. To do this, I had to do a series of "trades" between schools on schedules. Moving a team from one rotational cycle on the schedule to the other actually requires four teams to have movement. So, as you can imagine this also proved difficult.

Once I had the schedules relatively balanced, the final step was to designate the home and away team for each cycle. My goal here was to honor the existing home/home rotation for the current permanent opponents. I was not able to fully do this because Vanderbilt currently plays all of their permanent opponents on the same rotation. Vanderbilt is slated to play at Tennessee, South Carolina, and Ole Miss in 2025 (the year this would all start). That didn't work, so I had to make some adjustments. To fix this, I have South Carolina playing at Vanderbilt in 2024 and 2025. The downstream effect of this is that Auburn has to play at Georgia in 2024 and 2025 in my model. I'm sure Auburn will be fine with this. They will just go along with it for the good of the conference.

Note: Dawgs Central subscribers got an early look at this schedule. Our forum also includes the spreadsheet used to generate this schedule including the math behind the schedule difficulty and comments on how the home and home rotations was assigned for each opponent. Subscribe today!

So that was the process I went through to come up with the schedule. Now, let's take a look at each team's schedule in my model. We'll start with the Dawgs, and then go through the remaining teams in alphabetical order.

Since we play the Cocktail Party in Jacksonville, Georgia has four home games and four on the road each year. As you look through the other schools (aside from Texas and Oklahoma), you’ll see some crazy home slates. That’s what we are sacrificing with the Cocktail Party, but I think it’s worth it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I learned a lot from going through this. It made me sympathize with the schedule makers. If the SEC does move to a nine game schedule in 2025, I doubt it will look like this, and that’s ok. I don’t feel like where I landed is entirely perfect, but I do think it would be pretty cool. Moving to this model preserves most of the key rivalries on an annual basis, while also allowing everyone to play everyone home and home in a four year span. If we’re expanding the SEC, it’s time to expand the schedule as well.