Would SEC football bring back divisions? When will schedule format be set? Mailbag

Football season is officially over, and it’s hard not to laugh at the dichotomy. When the NFL season ends, the attention turns to roster building: the draft, free agency, basically what will rosters look like. You know, normal stuff.

When the college season ends, on the other hand, the attention turns to, essentially: What will the future of the sport look like?

As we sit here now, we don’t know what the format for the College Football Playoff will be this year. It’s very much up in the air beyond that. The SEC doesn’t have a set schedule format beyond this year. And next week comes an SEC-Big Ten summit where maybe they will divide the world … or just eat a bunch of jambalaya and agree to meet again later.

So with that, let’s get to a few questions:

Note: Submitted questions have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Is there any chance the SEC will return to divisions? Does not having divisions increase the odds of the SEC Championship Game going away as debating College Football Playoff eligibility increasingly sucks all the air out of the room? — Bo H.

When SEC athletic directors meet next week in New Orleans and then meet with their Big Ten counterparts, there may be a lot of out-of-the-box thinking. I’ve heard several of those ideas, but going back to divisions hasn’t been one of them. This past season saw a lot of great games, and a variety of matchups, that were happening on a much lesser scale when there were divisions.

Divisions were a constraint on scheduling, especially as conferences got bigger, and that resulted in a lot of stale annual “rivalries.” Yes, getting rid of divisions created unequal scheduling, but some of that already existed in division play, where teams had different cross-division opponents. And yes, no divisions meant tiebreaker headaches, but that’s a small price to pay for better matchups, and there’s a way to mitigate the tiebreaker issue.

Championship games aren’t going anywhere, at least in the SEC, given how lucrative they are for the television networks and the conferences. This past year’s SEC championship was the most-watched college football game to that point of the season. But there is a fun idea out there that could solve a few problems at once. My colleagues Ralph Russo and Stewart Mandel floated it last month, and it could get more discussion in New Orleans:

Rivalry weekend is moved up a week, and championship weekend becomes Thanksgiving weekend. Generally, television networks don’t want this because they love having college football inventory for Thursday through Saturday of a holiday weekend. So a way to satisfy the demand would be to create more games: The championship games are still held between the top two seeds, but then the conferences hold additional CFP play-in games: third in the standings versus sixth for one spot, fourth versus fifth for another.

This, of course, would be if the SEC and Big Ten end up having four permanent spots in the CFP. The question is how much the two conferences want to push for that; the Big Ten is more eager while the SEC has reservations. Television may still resist because it would ultimately be less inventory. Moving up the games is a fun idea, and it allows CFP games to be moved up. The underwhelming ratings for this year’s semifinals and championship surely had something to do with the season going too far into January when the NFL playoffs take so much attention. Of course, the 2027 national championship, to follow the 2026 season, the first in the format-to-be-decided, already has been announced as Jan. 25. That can always move, but my guess is a drastic change in the regular-season calendar will take a while.

Speaking of taking a while …

When will the SEC decide on a permanent scheduling format? It obviously will be only eight games. — Gene W.

That’s not obvious, especially if the SEC gets into a scheduling agreement with the Big Ten, which plays nine conference games. This almost certainly will be a discussion point in New Orleans, although I’m not sure there will be anything definitive on a scheduling agreement coming from next week.

But it wouldn’t be surprising if we get something on the SEC format. Nothing is set for 2026, so the conference needs to resolve that. My sense has been it will do another two-year, eight-game format, continuing to punt until it gets more money from ESPN. But if things with the Big Ten move quickly enough, who knows, maybe the nine-game schedule will come sooner than we thought.

Or maybe the Big Ten contracts to an eight-game schedule.

Texas quarterback Arch Manning threw for 939 yards and nine touchdowns this season. (Scott Wachter / Imagn Images)

If you could build a program around one of the following QBs, which would it be and why: DJ Lagway, LaNorris Sellers, Arch Manning, Nico Iamaleava, Gunner Stockton? — Chuck G.

Well, these days you don’t build a program around a quarterback; you only can build one season around them and hope they stick around more than one, which all of the above are doing. I’d be curious why you picked those five, rather than including Garrett Nussmeier, Diego Pavia, Marcel Reed and Taylen Green, who are also returning SEC quarterbacks. But those are the five you listed so I’ll play along.

Manning looks like the most sure thing, as boring an answer as that may be, mainly based on pedigree and a couple of starts. But I would be tempted to take Sellers, who is as dynamic as any returning quarterback in the country. Lagway and Iamaleava have pedigree too, and nobody would be shocked if one of them ends up being named to the All-SEC first team.

Stockton is the outlier. I’m not down on him: If he can combine the way he ran in the SEC championship with the way he passed in the Sugar Bowl and improve his pocket awareness, he can be very good. You’re talking about someone who was a five-star recruit before settling in as a solid four-star prospect. But Stockton isn’t guaranteed to start and will get a push from Ryan Puglisi.

Let me return to the original question and have some fun with it. If every SEC quarterback was made a free agent tomorrow, here’s the order in which the Emerson Collective would throw name, image and likeness money at them based just on what they could do for Emerson University this year:

1. Manning (Texas starter)
2. Sellers (South Carolina starter)
3. Lagway (Florida starter)
4. Iamaleava (Tennessee starter)
5. John Mateer (Oklahoma starter)
6. Pavia (Vanderbilt starter)
7. Nussmeier (LSU starter)
8. Green (Arkansas starter)
9. Reed (Texas A&M starter)
10. Jackson Arnold (Auburn starter)
11.  Stockton (Georgia starter?)
12. Austin Simmons (Ole Miss starter)
13. Ty Simpson (Alabama starter)
14. Beau Pribula (Missouri starter)
15. Michael Van Buren Jr. (LSU backup)
16. Zach Calzada (Kentucky starter)
17. Puglisi (Georgia backup?)
18. Keelon Russell (Alabama freshman backup)
19. Deuce Knight (Auburn freshman backup)
20. Luke Kromenhoek (Mississippi State QB)

Will Josh Heupel prove he can win on the road in the SEC and revive his passing game this year? Will Iamaleava flourish or flounder? — Bradford B., UT fan in Arlington, Va.

This ultimately is one of the questions about Heupel: Does his offense have a ceiling? It did its first job, which was to get Tennessee back to relevance, and that can’t be dismissed. Remember how many years Tennessee spent in the wilderness, then Heupel got it to a No. 1 ranking during his second year, then the CFP in his fourth year. (And yes the defense deserves most of the credit, as the offense was only eighth in the SEC in yards per play, although Tennessee was second in scoring offense, so it was doing something right.)

It should also be remembered that Tennessee exceeded expectations last season, picked seventh in the SEC preseason media poll, then getting conference’s the third CFP bid. So consider that disclaimer when I say Tennessee will again be picked in the fifth-to-eighth area. The Vols lose their best players on both sides of the ball, and while Iamaleava taking a big step forward would help, he loses his top three receivers.

The good news is the schedule. If 10-2 is what it will take to get back to the CFP, it will be a matter of getting three wins out of these games: Syracuse (in Charlotte), at Alabama, at Florida and home against Georgia and Oklahoma. (And avoiding upsets at Kentucky or Mississippi State and home against Arkansas and Vanderbilt.) The schedule may have helped the Vols get to last year’s CFP and could help them get back.

How many games does Hugh Freeze have to win to keep his job? — Davis S.

There’s a wide disparity of possibilities. Auburn has some cause for optimism next year, especially if Arnold flourishes in Freeze’s system. The schedule is helpful, with Alabama and Georgia traveling to Jordan-Hare Stadium. There’s a world where Auburn contends for a Playoff spot, and if it happens while Kalen DeBoer has a rough second season at Alabama, the feelings along the Plains will be very high.

But this program lost at home to Cal, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Vanderbilt and went 5-7 in Freeze’s second year, which is supposed to be the big leap for coaches. So how optimistic should Auburn fans be for Year 3? While going 7-5 would be a reason for Freeze to point at improvement, it won’t feel very strong, unless that 7-5 includes wins over Georgia or Alabama.

Billy Napier pulled off the late-season goodwill credit/momentum. But the Gators have a daunting 2025 schedule facing four ranked Top-25 teams in the first six weeks. If Napier has a carbon copy 2024 season start, could he survive? — Moe J.

This could be very off, but it feels like by riding it out last year, Napier has some runway, unless a new school president comes in antsy to make a change. After two home guarantee games to open the season, Florida goes to LSU and Miami, then after the bye hosts Texas and goes to Texas A&M. Can Napier lose all four? It depends on how competitive those four games are. Remember that Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin announced last year that Napier was returning after the Georgia game when the Gators kept it close, just as they did a few weeks before at Tennessee. If the Gators are again competitive early this season, you would think the administration will want to give the team a chance in the second half of the season, when it faces Georgia, goes to Ole Miss and hosts Tennessee. Then you make a call, potentially in November if the wheels start to come off.

Then again, what’s happening elsewhere will dictate a lot of this. It could be a busy year in the SEC hiring cycle, and schools may want to jump in early, especially with the transfer portal looming.

At this point next year, which SEC team(s) do you think will have a new coach? — Joe B.

I’m not going to outright predict firings and changes because that could be aggregated by some AI-generated website. I will say that this gave me an idea for a story to come, hopefully later this month. And if I had to put an over-under on changes, I’d put it at 3.5.

And probably would bet the over.

(Top photo: Todd Kirkland / Getty Images)