Two and a half months before the 2023 college football season begins, the Southeastern Conference announced each of its teams’ league opponents for 2024.

It was a glimpse into the future in more ways than one.

The addition of Texas and Oklahoma as the SEC’s 15th and 16th members necessitated a major change in the league’s alignment and scheduling process. The East and West divisions we’ve come to know for 30 years will be gone in 2024. The two teams with the best record will advance to the championship game.

Along with the divisions, the SEC scrapped its familiar scheduling format of six opponents from one division and two from the other. It’s that provision that is really noticeable.

The SEC did its best to protect each school’s major rivalries like Ole Miss-Mississippi State, Alabama-Auburn and Florida-Georgia. Not all of them made the cut, however.

Mississippi State has played LSU 113 times in the past 127 years, including every season since 1944. That streak will end in 2024. Realignment did what it last took a world war to do.

The Bulldogs also will not play Alabama for the first time since 1947 and Auburn for the first time since 1951. On the bright side, dropping three perennial powers from the schedule could greatly enhance the chances of the Bulldogs winning 10 games or more and qualifying for the expanded College Football Playoff.

Ole Miss also gets to skip Alabama and Auburn, although its series with those teams had had the occasional interruption prior to the last big realignment in 1992.

More disheartening, it seems, is the loss of Vanderbilt from the schedule. Besides being a frequent victory for the Rebels — they’ve won the last four meetings by 14 points or more each — it’ll pause a series that has been played every year since 1970.

Another notable series that will go on hiatus is LSU-Auburn. The teams were not regular opponents prior to 1992, but generated one of the more odd and intense SEC rivalries of the past 30 years with a steady stream of memorable games. Earthquakes, victory cigars, burning arenas and band vs. kicker violence all became legendary moments, instantly recognizable by the mention of a word or two.

Without those moments building upon each other year after year, they become scattered fragments of greatness instead of something much more.

That’s the real price of progress, it seems. College sports are built on that Us vs. Them mindset, the sibling rivalries and border wars that are fed by familiarity. It’s a link to the past and hope for the future. The thrill of finally getting the upper hand in a blood feud or gaining bragging rights for a year.

Some of that will remain, and some of it will return. Texas vs. Texas A&M, notably, will get back on the schedule after a decade-long interruption. New rivalries might spin up, and there will be some novelty in playing Texas and Oklahoma the first couple of seasons.

It just seems like we’re losing more than we’re gaining. The 2024 season is still 14 months away and it already feels like we’ll remember 2023 as “the good old days.”

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Ernest Bowker is the sports editor of The Vicksburg Post. He can be reached at ernest.bowker@vicksburgpost.com