With Texas A&M coming to the SEC, assuming it resolves its legal issues with the Big XII, it seems logical that the SEC will seriously look for a 14th team rather than leave the West and East divisions unbalanced. It also seems logical that that 14th team will be from the dysfunctional and probably collapsing Big XII rather than an ACC school like FSU, Clemson, or VaTech, who haven't expressed any interest so far. If that happens and the SEC gets a school like Missouri, it only makes sense geographically that Auburn should move to the SEC East to balance the divisions. As an Auburn fan, I guess I could live with this, though I would definitely miss the annual Auburn-LSU game. Alabama fans would probably be more upset, because it would probably mean having to give up playing Tennessee every year in order to keep the Iron Bowl. By the way, if this happens I think the SEC should follow the Pac-12 and go to nine conference games so each team can still play three teams from the other division every year.
The other scenario I've heard talked about is both the SEC and the Pac-12 absorbing the remnants of a collapsed Big XII and becoming 16-team mega-conferences, possibly setting off further maneuvering among the Big 10, Big East, and ACC to try to do something similar. While a lot of talk in the media has been about potential tv deals and such, I'm much more concerned with what a 16-team league would make the conference schedule look like. If the SEC kept the East and West divisions, then probably both Auburn and Alabama would go to the East, but in my opinion that would make the divisions massively unbalanced (with respect to the other SEC West members and hypothetical Big XII additions), and that's not the only problem. Even with nine conference games, each team would only have two games against teams from the other division each year, meaning at best you would play a team from the other division only once every four years (less if you want any permanent cross-division match-ups). To me, that almost starts to feel like two separate conferences.
Here's my solution: Four 4-team mini-divisions, that might look something like this:
SEC East: Georgia, Florida, Vanderbilt, South Carolina
SEC North: Tennessee, Kentucky, two Big XII teams like Missouri and Oklahoma (or OSU)
SEC West: Arkansas, LSU, Texas A&M, another Big XII team like Texas Tech or maybe even Baylor
SEC South: Alabama, Auburn, Ole Miss, Mississippi State
I've seen something similar to this suggested before, but that person suggested a conference semi-final before the championship game. Rather than mess with the postseason like that, I propose something more interesting. The divisions would pair off each year to compete for the trip to Atlanta, and each year the pairs would rotate. So the first year, the winner of the East-North would play the winner of the West-South in the championship, followed by East-South vs. West-North the next year, then East-West vs. North-South, and back to the beginning again. Every team would play the three teams from their division plus the four teams from the division they're paired with, with two free conference games (the conference schedule would go to nine games), so cross-division rivalry games like Alabama-Tennessee and Auburn-Georgia wouldn't be threatened. To me, this seems like the best way that a 16-team SEC could preserve its big rivalries as well as regional rivalries, not mess with the postseason, and still allow all teams to play each other fairly regularly. As a bonus, having four rotating divisions means you would never have a situation like the Big XII had where one side grows much stronger than the other.
Just my thoughts. Its clear that change is coming to the SEC, and I just hope Mike Slive and the other people in charge don't screw things up and ruin something that has been working perfectly well. The best outcome I can see out of the ones that seem possible right now would be for the SEC to grab West Virginia from the Big East and then everything continues on as basically normal just with one more conference game on the schedule.
