It’s a brave new world out there as the 2024 college football season has now been underway for nearly a month. With it comes the expanded 12-team playoff and new – even more expanded – conferences. Well on their way to being branded the nation’s two super conferences, the SEC and BIG 10 now include 16 and 18 schools, respectively. 

The new alignments pay little attention to geography and numerical values matching its new conference’s names, but they do pay attention to expanded revenue markets and a better shot at getting more teams into the postseason. In the BIG 10, West Coast teams like USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington now play the likes of Ohio State and Michigan. In the SEC, the debate over just what is Southern keeps moving farther away from the Mason-Dixon Line, as Texas and Oklahoma join the ranks of a conference that also welcomed Texas A&M and Missouri in 2012. 

But while adding the Red River Rivalry means more revenue from markets controlled by the Longhorns and Sooners, it has also shaken up how the SEC handles business amongst its already established teams. Divisions have disappeared as quickly as a Georgia player’s drivers license, and gone now are the days of former SEC West teams like Mississippi State and Ole Miss playing fellow divisional squads like Alabama and LSU each and every season. Most rivalries have been maintained, but no longer will the winner of the SEC East and West face off in Atlanta for the conference championship. Winning percentages will now reign king to determine who will duke it out to win the conference.

Absorbing all of the new changes, meanwhile, are the 16 SEC fanbases, and there’s a ton to acclimate to.

Vicksburg attorney and former Ole Miss Rebels player Bobby Bailess said it’s going to take some time for fans to get used to the new roster of schools.

“My affiliation (with Ole Miss) goes way back,” he said. “I went to school there in 1969 on a football scholarship and stayed, for the most part, through law school. So I spent almost eight years up there. As far as the teams being added in, I guess there is a thing as too big of a conference, and we might be there, I don’t know. But, I think we have two high-caliber teams added. Who would have ever thought that Texas and Oklahoma would come into the Southeastern Conference? It’s hard to believe.”

Bailess said the 2024 schedules may look different, but he is glad lynchpin rivalry games like the Egg Bowl and Iron Bowl have been preserved, while rivalries interrupted by the last round of realignments — such as Texas and Texas A&M – will now be rekindled inside the SEC.

“Back when I was in school, we didn’t play Alabama every year,” he said. “Everybody was kind on their own and it wasn’t like it is with the TV requirements for schedules like it is today. But, I think it’s going to work fine. I would prefer that Ole Miss and Mississippi State get included in all the pressurized games, but everybody is going to take their turn at that, it looks like to me. I’m sure they’re going to rotate it around as equitably as they can. But they’re not going to slip up and let Alabama and Auburn not play, or slip up and let Mississippi State and Ole Miss not play.”

Phillip Scurria, the voice of Porter’s Chapel football and part of the LSU faithful in the Magnolia State, said the conference realignments are logical next steps following the addition of NIL (Name Image and Likeness) and the transfer portal to college athletics.

“Part of me wishes we had added North Carolina A&T and Centenary, so it would be someone we could beat on a regular basis,” Scurria joked. “But, they’re looking for more competition and more money. I think football will never be the same because of NIL and the transfer portal and, to me, the transfer portal is more problematic than the NIL.”

Scurria also said moving away from the SEC East and West divisions is a worrisome call in his eyes, especially as it relates to deciding who makes it to Atlanta.

“The tiebreakers – and there’s like seven of them – I think there’s going to be a lot of hard feelings if they have to go to the second or third tiebreaker to decide who plays in the championship game, because it’s such a competitive league and anybody can beat anybody just about on any given Saturday.” 

Scurria also expressed concerns over missing yearly games with teams that have become rivals  over the years.

“We don’t play Mississippi State this year,” he said. “That’s one of our oldest rivalries. I hate to lose that. Who knows when we’ll play them now. And for years LSU played Tulane as their last game of the year. Then, we got switched to Arkansas as our last game, and that was okay after they joined the conference. But now, that’s gone, too. And we haven’t played Ole Miss on Halloween in years and years. So, it’s harder, I think, on older fans like me to adjust to these changes. Those old traditions are very much ingrained in us and we’ll just have to adapt.”

Former Mississippi State player Bobby Fleming also said it will be strange to not see his team play certain SEC squads this year.

“It has been since the 30s and 40s since Mississippi State has not played LSU and has not played Alabama,” he said. “I was a freshman in the fall of ’58 and graduated in the summer of ’62 and the only SEC teams that would come to Mississippi State and play was Alabama. We played them on an alternating home and away – and Ole Miss. We played LSU every year in Baton Rouge.”

Fleming, who played guard on both sides of the ball for the Bulldogs – and whose son Trey walked on in Starkville as a tackle – said he has seen the conference change many times since his playing days, but still has a hard time letting go of yearly matchups that have become mini-rivalries over the years.

“We played Georgia one year in Athens and two years in Atlanta,” he said. “We played Auburn every year, either in Auburn or in Birmingham.”

But Fleming said coming to grips with the changing landscape of the game, literally in some cases, just comes with the territory in college football.

“My freshman year, State and LSU played in Jackson, and that was the last game that was played in old Hinds Memorial Stadium. Then Alabama and Mississippi State started alternating between Jackson and Tuscaloosa. The main reason we played those teams off like that is the stadium at that time (in Starkville) didn’t hold but 35,000 people. We’d play Tennessee in either Knoxville or Memphis.”

Fleming said times changed after his graduation and brought bigger stadiums and a shift in venues away from neutral sites like Jackson and Birmingham. Fans got used to it and soon playing games almost exclusively on collegiate campuses was the norm. And the new changes, he feels, will soon feel normal as well.

“I’m looking forward to some of it. Really and truly, all of the teams in the SEC are pretty good football teams. The ones State would play will not be any pushovers.”

And Fleming is onto something when considering the pedigree added to the conference in 2024. Texas and Oklahoma boast a combined 11 claimed national titles between the two schools – four for the Longhorns and seven for the Sooners. That number adds to the 38 claimed national titles currently on the books for the SEC, dating back to 1934 in football alone.

As this season unfolds, it remains to be seen whether or not fans’ concerns over a lack of divisions and missing out on what have become yearly grudge matches with familiar opponents will take away from the overall magic of the sport, but history has shown football fans adapt quickly to change. 

But in what is arguably the nation’s best conference – and by a significant margin – there was a time when simply passing the ball as often as running it was a major hurdle to clear. Will Texas and Oklahoma disrupt a good thing or add to it? Can the conference function without divisions? Will NIL and transfer portals ruin recruiting? These questions loom in the minds of many, especially in the SEC where it Just. Means. More.