Talk:Southeastern Conference

Rivalries
The Tennessee-Florida rivalry is for some reason described as the "third Saturday in November." Tennessee plays Florida in September every year. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.49.73.211 (talk) 05:33, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Someone (anonymous IP) keeps removing the Kentucky-Louisville basketball rivalry game. They keep saying it is because Louisville is not in the SEC, but if you look at the list of rivalries in the football section (or others in other sections), it is quite apparent that the requirement is only that one team be in the SEC to be included in the list. If whoever is doing it bothers to read this, please stop removing. Cardsplayer4life (talk) 00:24, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Yeah, definitely no requirement that both teams have to be from the same conference. The rivalry section just gives a small snap-shot of rivalries that involve SEC schools. Doesn't mean it has to be between two SEC schools. Rtr10 (talk) 02:00, 4 June 2009 (UTC)


 * I also agree that it should be kept. Basketball, football, or whatever; the article should list any rivalry involving an SEC school in the section for that sport. Zeng8r (talk) 23:35, 5 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Someone should add Tennessee-Memphis (another SEC rivalry with a non-conference school) Tjmpb (talk) 02:49, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

LSU has many, many rivalries. The games against Auburn and Arkansas have official names (Tiger Bowl and Battle for the Golden Boot). Alabama has a rivalry with LSU listed, but it isn't listed in LSU's portion of the table (also, this rivalry is more intense than the one with Florida). I'd fix it, but I don't want to mess up the table.Dukeofwulf (talk) 20:58, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Can I add the rivalries for Texas A&M? nrp0450 —Preceding undated comment added 19:52, 8 June 2012 (UTC)


 * I think it would be appropiate to add Texas Tech, Baylor, TCU, SMU, and Rice on there. I can do it if you want69.179.235.96 (talk) 16:42, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Change back to previous format?
Can we change the rivalry table back to the previous format where one team is specified on the left and its rivals are specified on the right. We don't necessarily have to have the merged cells, but I think the rivals should be specified from each school/fanbase viewpoint. For example, South Carolina counts Georgia as a rival, but Georgia doesn't really count SC as a rival since for Georgia the Florida, Auburn, Tenn, and non-conf GT games are more important. So it could probably be something like this:

Team    Team     Rivalry ... Georgia Auburn   Deep South's Oldest Rivalry Georgia Florida  Florida-Georgia... Georgia  Ga. Tech Clean Old-Fashioned Hate Georgia Tenn...  Georgia-Tennessee... ... S. Car. Clemson Palmetto Bowl S. Car. Georgia Georgia-South Carolina... ...

--162.239.236.97 (talk) 06:55, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

The football rivalries listed for Missouri are all defunct: Illinois dropped the annual football game several years ago and the others all ended for the foreseeable future when Missouri left the Big 12. While I don't know the status of all the other listed rivalries, many if not all of them are ongoing. Seems to me we should limit this to ongoing rivalries, and eliminate all the defunct ones. Wschart (talk) 13:32, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Proposal to make timelines more consistent
I noticed that conferences in List of NCAA conferences have articles, usually including a membership timeline. While some of the decisions made for each conference make some sense, there is a wide variety of styles for the various timelines, particularly involving color choices, but also other matters of style that could be more consistent.

for example, a school with a yellow bar means:
 * An associate member in one sport (if part of the BE)
 * A former member of the conference (in the SEC)
 * A future member of the conference (in the SEC and Big West)
 * A football only member (in the Sun Belt)
 * A team that has moved to another conference (in the WAC, NEC)
 * A full member of the Big Sky

Some graphs have captions, some do not, and none are centered. To see the variety of styles, review Current conference timelines

I think it would be worth discussing how best to provide some measure of consistency, recognizing that there may be legitimate reasons for some differences from a standard presentation (for example, some conferences show the name of the new conference for former members. In some cases, this makes sense, in other, it may not.)

I've produced a draft of how the timelines would look with some consistency added. Please see Draft proposal of conference timelines.

I propose a discussion to see if there is consensus on improving the consistency.

Because it would not be practical to have this discussion on each and every conference talk page, I suggest centralizing this discussion at the Talk page of Project College football SPhilbrick  (Talk)  19:09, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

Discussion about overview maps for US collegiate athletic conferences
A discussion on the Project College Football talk page has been created to discuss the proper format of the overview maps that are used for the US collegiate athletic conference pages.

If you're interested, please join the discussion here: Athletic conference overview maps and their lack of consistency — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mdak06 (talk • contribs) 19:47, July 14, 2012

Sources for football rivalry series records
An editor has recently added footnotes from the Mcubed.com website as sources for each of the SEC football rivalry series. Mcubed.com does not reflect the official record adjustments of Alabama or any other program as a result of NCAA penalties. I propose to replace those footnotes with ones from College Football Data Warehouse, which accurately reflect the NCAA adjustments to official win-loss records. If anyone objects or has further suggestions as to how this problem should be resolved, please comment here. If no one voices any objection in the next ten days, I will make the proposed changes. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 12:57, 28 August 2012 (UTC)

College basketball team navboxes
Please join discussion at the College Basketball Wikiproject for forming a consensus on the creation of a basic navbox for college basketball teams. CrazyPaco (talk) 05:57, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Inclusion of "Schools ranked by academic measures" sections within Conference Articles
This section now exists in multiple conference articles. Please join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football to help improve this content. UW Dawgs (talk) 06:27, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

Head football coach compensation tables
There is a discussion of "Head football coach compensation tables" as implemented within this article, ongoing at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject College football which may be of interest to you. UW Dawgs (talk) 07:01, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Schools' colors in the members section
I think someone needs to add the schools' colors in the members section chart because the schools utilize their colors in various ways, including athletics, branding, marketing, etc., and additionally, since the SEC is an athletic conference, I think the colors are an appropriate addition to further inform readers about the SEC, i.e. look at the other Power 5 conferences and they have their school colors there. Jay (talk) 00:47, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Jay, the school colors have been repeatedly deleted from the other conference pages, too. It's another example of gilding the lily with non-core information that causes the tables to line-wrap on smaller monitors and hand-helds.  Frankly, I'm tired of deleting the colors from the other pages.  The colors are prominently shown on every team and athletic program page for anyone that needs to know.  From a graphics design standpoint, showing 28 different color hexes in a small space looks like a dog's breakfast.  It's not even "decorative"; it's a mess.  Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 00:59, 28 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I understand your reasoning now. I have to agree with you on the way the page looks with smartphones, tablets, and the like. Thanks for responding. Jay (talk) 02:23, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

Recent deletions and claim of over-emphasis on football
Recently, Drmies made a handful of edits to remove content from this article or rewrite it. I agreed with many of these edits, but not all, and I undid 3 of them. I believe our edit summaries do a pretty good job laying out our respective positions, and I invite everyone to take a look at them. But because we disagree, I would like to raise the issue here for further discussion and hopefully some sort of consensus.

Specifically, I reverted edits to undo: (1) the removal of the Rivalries list under the Football heading; (2) the removal of the list of permanent rivals for football scheduling purposes; and (3) the removal of the Facilities table listing (football, basketball, baseball).

Drmies then undid my edits, commenting on my User Talk page: "Surely you've noticed that football takes up an unusual and undue amount of space. A list of rivalries is hardly very relevant for an article on the conference; there is already way too much stuff that is relevant to individual schools and football programs but not to the general article." Because I believe this question warranted discussion beyond the two of us, I am now raising the issue here.

(1) My response is that football is far and away the biggest generator of fan interest and income for the Southeastern Conference and its members; for nearly every school, it is one of the oldest sports and the most prominent. Football rivalries are long-standing (100+ years in some cases), often independently notable (with their own Wikipedia articles), and may bleed over into other sports and the fan bases generally. So listing "football" rivalries makes sense both because football is objectively (and subjectively) the most important sport to the conference and members, and because most are not solely limited to football. Further, the handful of rivalries specific to other sports are listed elsewhere in the article (for women's basketball, baseball, and "other sports"; men's basketball lists permanent scheduling partners). I think football rivalries (especially the many rivalries between 2 SEC members) are absolutely relevant to this article.

Potential compromise: Create a new article for the admittedly long list of SEC football rivalries, then link it from here with a brief description.

(2) The logic of including cross-division football scheduling partners is similar. If a reader wants to know how SEC football scheduling works, they would likely look to this article. In the current revision, they would learn that "Under the current format, each school plays a total of eight conference games, consisting of the other six teams in its division, one school from the other division on a rotating basis, and one school from the other division that it plays each year." (emphasis added). What they would not learn is which teams from opposite divisions play every year, though that question would surely come to mind. Because there are only 14 teams, we only need a 7-row table to answer that obvious question. That hardly seems out of proportion in an article of this length.

(3) As for the Facilities table, this is quite common among collegiate athletic conferences. (See, for example, ACC, Big Ten articles.) Of course this information is available elsewhere, like in the institutions' articles. But having it listed in table form is helpful for someone who wants to quickly get a sense of what facilities exist in the SEC, or to compare various programs at a glance without having to pull up multiple articles ("What West Division team has the smallest football stadium?" "How big are most SEC basketball arenas?" etc.) While each data point is relevant only to a specific school/program, the comparative feature is useful, relevant to the SEC as a whole, and unavailable elsewhere.

I believe each of these items belongs in this article. Drmies clearly disagrees. I hope other editors will take this opportunity to provide their own views and rationales. Thanks. --EightYearBreak (talk) 15:19, 16 October 2019 (UTC) It's worth delineating the cross-division rivalries. I've added in a prose listing of these permanent matchups, linking to rivalry articles where applicable (6 out of the 7 do have an article), listing them alphabetically by the West members. Maybe this works better than the table. I support splitting off a separate article for SEC Football if it is felt that the existing article is too long. Simple but powerful  19:37, 8 December 2019 (UTC)
 * Well, I appreciate the note here, and for now I will state my objections briefly--but in essence they all boil down to the same thing: the content I removed (and there is more) is excessive for this article, an article which read (or reads) like it came from the SEC website. For instance, a table indicating cross-division football match-ups is much too much for the article, and arguing that it's not excessive for this article length is circular: it states that excess is a warranty for more excess. A list of facilities is likewise excessive; it is not essential to what the SEC is or does, and it goes toward the idea of undue information as well: it is obvious that the article follows the financial interests of the conference in its structure. That is a more general problem with the article, and it is s serious problem. The article goes football, basketball, baseball, girls, other sports--to put it colloquially. In other words, the sequence is essentially sexist and financial, and so are the amounts of information presented in the article. That the article on the Iron Bowl is bigger and has more reference than the article on the Vanderbilt Women's Lacrosse team (or whatever) makes sense given the media coverage (unfortunately), but that should not apply to a general article on a conference, much of whose content doesn't even have secondary sourcing. So, if you're going to spend however many kilobytes on a list of football stadiums, and you say "I'm doing this because it is inherently valid and the reader likes it", and it's all based on primary sourcing, then you have no reason besides your male football POV to not do the same thing for all the other sports played in the conference. And besides, it already was unnecessary. EightYearBreak, the "you" here isn't necessarily you: it is the general you--I hope you understand that I am not painting you here as a sexist jock. But the article, and I hope you see this, is clearly skewed toward the standard setup where football is king and the women's sports are "Lady" this or that. Thank you, Drmies (talk) 16:13, 16 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Every FBS conference article (Template:NCAA Division I FBS conference navbox) has a "Facilities" section. I've restored that content. And 8 of 9 FBS conf articles have football rivalry content (7 via tables, 1/Pac-12 via prose, ACC does not).  However, the SEC football section/content is or was too large (full article  is currently 127kB vs WP:TOOBIG at ~100kB).  Excessive football detail belongs in a new article at Southeastern Conference football (ala Big 12 Conference football -I think the only conf which has a football article to date). And a new "Southeastern Conference football" article would be a better home for the football rivalry content, rather than restoring it to this article. UW Dawgs (talk) 18:54, 16 October 2019 (UTC)


 * Where did all of this information go to? Did a new article ever get created? Esb5415 (talk) 22:35, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Key personnel: volleyball coaches?
As of now, the "Key personnel" table includes, for each school, the following positions: Athletic director, Football coach, Men's basketball coach, Women's basketball coach, Baseball coach, Softball coach, Volleyball coach.

I think this table, conceptually, is a good idea for an "at a glance" look at the most notable people in the SEC (for better or for worse). Certainly, a list of key people would include the AD, football, and both basketball coaches, since those are the 3 most well-known NCAA sports. (I have no source, but I think that's indisputable, right? In terms of revenue, TV, etc.) Also fair to say, I think, that baseball is a significant college sport, particularly among some SEC schools, and baseball stadiums are listed under the Facilities heading. I'm less sure about softball's inclusion, but it's at least plausible since it's the counterpart to baseball, and it appears that most of these coaches have Wikipedia articles; it wouldn't surprise me if softball was the second-most prominent women's sport, at least.

But why are volleyball coaches included? It looks like not a single coach even has a Wikipedia article, or at least none are linked. Vanderbilt doesn't even have a team at all. I can easily think of sports that are more significant, at least on certain campuses (e.g., Arkansas track, or Alabama/Georgia gymnastics, though not everyone has gymnastics). That's not to say I'd replace volleyball with track, just that it's hardly obvious that volleyball belongs there. I actually lean toward just deleting the column altogether, because it's just noise distracting from the more noteworthy aspects. If the information needs to be on Wikipedia at all, maybe there could be a separate article, like "List of SEC athletic head coaches" or something. --EightYearBreak (talk) 18:47, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

Texas A&M Womens basketball championship is missing
In 2011 the Texas A&M Womens basketball team won the national championship. 158.135.169.237 (talk) 04:17, 5 October 2023 (UTC)