ATHENS, Ga. — Josh Brooks’ mentions on Twitter exploded Tuesday night when Georgia’s 2023 football schedule was announced. The dozen opponents already were known, including the fact Oklahoma would not be among them. But sometimes when it all becomes official and the average person sees the No. 1 team (this year) starting with the gauntlet of Tennessee-Martin, Ball State, South Carolina and UAB, all at home, well …
“What I would tell everyone is I understand it,” Brooks said Friday. “And I think that we’re solving a lot of that as you work through future SEC scheduling.”
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Here’s how the 2023 schedule ended up seemingly so weak and how it could change in the future:
The Oklahoma series
When Georgia and Oklahoma agreed to a home-and-home, the assumption was the teams would be in separate conferences. They would play at Oklahoma in 2023 and at Georgia in 2031. Then the Sooners opted to join the SEC by 2025, perhaps a year earlier, meaning only the game at Oklahoma could happen according to the original contract.
Folding the 2031 game into the SEC schedule was a non-starter for logistical reasons. The SEC was the one to officially step in and order the series to be canceled, but Georgia was fully on board.
“We’re not going to look to be a guarantee game for someone else,” Brooks said. “And there really weren’t any (Power) 5 options out there. … So really, you’re limited to (Group of 5) opponents that had an opening on this specific date. Because if we looked for another day, then you’re domino effect, and so you’re really looking for just one opponent in one day.”
The search for a new NCAA president should "accelerate" in the next two-to-four months, and the eventual successor could be from inside or outside college athletics.
Update from a search committee member, Georgia president Jere Morehead:https://t.co/Bc1GI4bzfU
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Brooks worked with ESPN scheduling maven Dave Brown to find an opponent that worked for the same weekend, and Ball State was the result. There may have been talks with Oklahoma about perhaps moving it to a neutral site, but they didn’t get far.
“Trust me, we vetted every option possible,” Brooks said.
SEC schedule format
Georgia is still going to play Oklahoma; it’s just going to be part of the new SEC format, which is going to make things a lot better. Whether it stays at eight or expands to nine games, this will make future schedules harder because of doing away with divisions. No more playing Missouri, Vanderbilt and Kentucky every year (even though Kentucky has been pretty good lately). In the likely nine-game format there will be three permanent opponents for each team — in Georgia’s case Florida, Auburn and South Carolina — with the rest rotating equally. If it’s an eight-game schedule, Georgia would play Florida every year, with the rest rotating equally.
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The result is every SEC team will play each other at least twice every four years, home and away. That in itself will do wonders for Georgia’s schedule.
In the worst year (again, on paper) this is what Georgia’s schedule would look like in a nine-game format: Florida, Auburn, South Carolina, Vanderbilt, Missouri, Kentucky, Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Arkansas.
But the next year, because of rotating, it would look like this: Florida, Auburn, South Carolina, Alabama, LSU, Tennessee, Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma.
More likely, every year will be around an equal combination of those two. And even if it’s only an eight-game schedule, the rotation above will be similar, just with Florida as the only permanent opponent.
“No matter where we land, you’re going to see a greater variability of the Western teams playing in here,” Brooks said. “So I think as we looked at the possibility of one grouping (as a conference), not East to West, then you’ll get a greater rotation so you won’t get so stagnant. So I think that will provide some greater home games scheduled in the future.”
Oklahoma and other nonconference series
Georgia also had a series scheduled with Texas (2026-27) that is essentially null and void, although it could be folded into the SEC schedule. That remains to be seen, and Brooks and UGA president Jere Morehead were careful about the fate of their other nonconference series because of the uncertainty over the SEC schedule.
Morehead said he didn’t anticipate the presidents voting on a new format (eight or nine games) by their meeting next month.
“We have to see, if we go to a nine-game schedule, is that going to provide an opportunity to renegotiate the contracts with ESPN and the like,” Morehead said. “What we negotiated now was an eight-game schedule. So there’s a lot of factors that have got to be played out before we’ll know whether or not we’re going to do eight or nine and what’s best for Georgia.”
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Georgia still has the following nonconference games set:
• 2024: Clemson (in Atlanta)
• 2025: at UCLA
• 2026: UCLA, at Louisville
• 2027: at Florida State, Louisville
• 2028: Florida State
• 2029: at Clemson
• 2030: Clemson, Ohio State
• 2031: at Ohio State
• 2032: Clemson
• 2033: at Clemson, NC State
• 2034: at NC State
When asked about all these games, Brooks had an interesting answer.
“We’re still playing Georgia Tech,” he said.
Speaking of which …
Georgia Tech
This is the anchor at the end of the schedule, and if Georgia Tech were a stronger, more competitive program, Georgia’s 2023 and future schedules would look more difficult. As one person around the program put it this week, the mentality is Georgia Tech is always “one or two years away” from being a much better game on paper.
In the meantime, it doesn’t stick out as an impressive game. But it is a guaranteed ninth Power 5 opponent for Georgia every year, and so far there’s no indication that if the SEC goes to nine games, the rivalry would be in jeopardy.
The cocktail party
Playing the game in Jacksonville means every other year the home schedule is a little weaker than it could have been. Still, there appears to be little interest among people at Georgia, other than Kirby Smart, in moving the game. It makes too much money — a few million more every two years than if it was a home-and-home — and the tradition of the game is hard to deny.
The coming changes to the SEC scheduling format shouldn’t have an impact, and Florida has made clear it prefers to keep the game in Jacksonville. Any contemplation of moving the game would be in Georgia’s court.
And again, on that, Brooks and Morehead said they wanted to resolve the SEC schedule first.
“One of the key dominoes in this whole equation is getting our conference schedule set, and we can look at that — we still have time on that,” Brooks said. “We’re not in a rush on that right now. We’re locked in through ’23 anyway.”
(Top photo of Kirby Smart: John Adams / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
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