SEC football coaches get ‘controversial’ at conference call over added opponents, per reports

Little feels normal about college football in the lead-up to a potential 2020 season that — at best — will feature just six of the 10 FBS conferences in action amid the the COVID-19 pandemic. But details from a Thursday chat among SEC football coaches have emerged to illustrate how high passions for the game remain, even amid all the uncertainty.

A conference call among the league’s coaches “turned contentious” during a discussion about how SEC leaders decided on which two additional opponents each team will play this season, ESPN and Yahoo reported.

It’s not hard to see why some coaches might have an issue with the additional opponents that were added to their schedules last week when the league released more details about how its 10-game, conference-only football season is slated to look this fall.

For example, Arkansas got stuck with playing SEC East powers Florida and Georgia, and Missouri added SEC West juggernauts Alabama and LSU to its slate. The league offered little explanation for how it decided the additional matchups. One coach claimed that “favoritism was played,” according to ESPN.

The league’s top contenders to reach the College Football Playoff clearly received favorable draws. Georgia added Mississippi State and Arkansas, both of which are led by first-year coaches. Defending national champion LSU added Vanderbilt and Missouri, which are likely to be picked to finish sixth and seventh in the SEC East. And perennial power Alabama added Kentucky and Missouri, neither of which should provide much resistance.

There was no clear formula for how the SEC decided on its schedule additions, and that fact was a point of frustration for the coaches on Thursday’s call, according to ESPN and Yahoo.

“The call got pretty wild,” one league coach told ESPN. “It would have been a good piece of reality TV.”

Conference officials appeared to try and give teams a balanced slate based on who they were already scheduled to play. Georgia, for example, was scheduled to play Auburn and Alabama as part of its original schedule. So the Bulldogs’ slate would have become particularly tough if the league had added LSU.