SEC may have the most difficult time with the Oklahoma Sooners than any other team in the conference when it comes to new rule
The Oklahoma Sooners will have three permanent SEC rivals.
There’s a new rule going on in the SEC, something many of you probably saw come across your timeline on Thursday, and it does affect the Oklahoma Sooners, along with every other team in the SEC.
But, if you didn’t know – the SEC is requiring that all SEC teams have three permanent conference rivals that they will play every year. This comes with the SEC changing their scheduling format from eight conference games to nine. Then, the other six conference games will rotate between teams in the SEC every now and then to ensure that everyone plays everyone within a certain time span.
Now, this is a great rule if you’re just a college football fan and you want more parity and more great games. But, if you’re a fan of an SEC team, you may not like this. The SEC is the best conference in college football, and it’s not close. We saw last year, with teams like Vanderbilt and Arkansas upsetting top schools in the SEC, that any given Saturday any team can win.
Now that means you have one less “guaranteed win” than your did before, as instead of four non-conference games, you now have three. Overall, this is a great rule for the sport.
However, this puts the Sooners in a difficult positions, specifically when it comes to the SEC picking their three rivals.
Who are Oklahoma Sooners’ three permanent SEC rivals?
When you get to this side of the rule, things can get a bit hard for the Sooners. Them and Texas are the newest SEC teams in the conference, having only played last year as an SEC team, and for the Sooners, they didn’t really have any crazy games last year with any rivals, because they pretty much lost every SEC game besides their win over Alabama and their win over Auburn.
And even those games were kind of weird in that, the Tigers were terrible and it took the Sooners having Sooner magic to win, and the other game against Alabama was just flat-out weird.
When you think of their three rivals, one has to be there – Texas. The best rivalry in all of sports is one that has to remain in tact. So, that’s one team, and the other team has to be Mizzou, just because of the history there with the Big 8 conference. But who is the third one?
Something tells me that the SEC may want it to be LSU, because that’s been the Sooners final game of the season two years in a row after this season. But does that one really make sense? That is no rivalry, neither is Florida, Ole Miss, South Carolina, and Tennessee, the other SEC games the Sooners have played, and the other programs I have seen brought up in this discussion as the Sooners third team.
Who it will be? I’m not sure. Who knows, maybe it’s a team like Arkansas, the closest team to Oklahoma when it comes to all Power Four schools, and a school that also will have trouble figuring out their third team due to conflicting rivalries elsewhere.
Or, maybe it’s LSU, and it’s a rivalry that the SEC creates and fabricates. Either way, it will be interesting seeing how it plays out.
