SEC football: Could the conference actually play a season alone?

There have been some rumblings that SEC football would go on even if other conferences decide they can’t field their teams. Could this actually happen?

SEC football fans are a different breed, so when word began to spread that the Southeastern Conference might play a football season even if other conferences decided to sit this one out, fans were not surprised.

You often hear the words tradition, way of life, or even religion associated with SEC football. Even the motto repeated constantly on the SEC Network, “It just means more” gives a pretty accurate depiction of just how important college football is in the deep south.

But when talking about a global pandemic and dealing with a somewhat mysterious virus that, by all accounts, is highly contagious through various forms of contact as well as via air droplets, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey had best be sure he’s got all the info before he starts talking the SEC going rogue this year.

The feeling among many university presidents and conference commissioners outside the SEC is that sports cannot resume until campuses are deemed safe for students to return. No students. No sports. End of story.

Greg Sankey seems to possibly think otherwise, via Sports Illustrated:

"“There is room for different conferences to make different decisions. If there’s a couple of programs that aren’t able (to play football), does that stop everyone? I’m not sure it does… But the ability for us to stay connected will remain important.“Our hope is that people continue to pursue the healthy course. That hope is not a plan, but right now the desire would be to have 11 states and 14 (SEC) institutions moving forward in a collective manner and, like I said, connected nationally so that we can celebrate the return of college sports.”"

This doesn’t exactly sound like Sankey is sold on the idea that every conference or even every school needs to be playing by the same rules or under the same restrictions, a sentiment echoed about the nationwide situation in this New York Times editorial.

Could the SEC make a go of it alone if needed? It would take some maneuvering and rescheduling but certainly, there’s no reason to suspect it couldn’t (or wouldn’t) be done.

With 14 teams and several good inter-divisional rivals, a slightly abbreviated schedule could easily be put together. Possibly even doing away with the divisions for a season and making a 14-team table, with a conference playoff at the end of the season featuring the top four teams.

The SEC’s own version of the College Football Playoff.

Besides, doesn’t the rest of the college football world maintain SEC schools don’t play anybody worthwhile out of their own conference anyway?

All of this boils down to one thing. People want to move away from this so-called “new normal” and back to a somewhat more familiar state of normalcy. Sports is a huge part of that in the American culture, and in the south, SEC football is practically its foundation.

“If we’re not playing football in the fall,” Sankey went on to say in the interview, “I’d leave the football field and be thinking about what’s happening around us. If football is not an active part of our life in the fall, what’s happening around us becomes a real big question societally, economically and culturally.”

SEC football drives both economics and culture in this regions, and the $44.6 million in total revenue distributed to each Southeastern conference school by the league, which was a seven-figure increase from the previous year, is the hard proof of how “it just means more”.