The SEC has set the three opponents each team will play annually beginning with the conference’s new nine-game schedule format in 2026, putting an emphasis on traditional and geographic rivalries.
That means a temporary end to Alabama and LSU playing every year, in favor of Alabama playing Mississippi State each year. But this set of annual opponents will only be applied for a four-year cycle over the 2026 to 2029 seasons and will be revisited for the 2030 schedule and beyond.
Auburn
Tennessee
Mississippi State
Missouri
Texas
LSU
Alabama
Georgia
Vanderbilt
Georgia
South Carolina
Kentucky
Auburn
Florida
South Carolina
Florida
Tennessee
South Carolina
Arkansas
Ole Miss
Texas A&M
Ole Miss
Vanderbilt
Alabama
Arkansas
Texas A&M
Oklahoma
Missouri
Ole Miss
Texas
Mississippi State
LSU
Oklahoma
Georgia
Florida
Kentucky
Alabama
Kentucky
Vanderbilt
Texas A&M
Arkansas
Oklahoma
LSU
Missouri
Texas
Auburn
Tennessee
Mississippi State
The three annual opponents were first reported on Monday morning by On3 and were confirmed by The Athletic. On Tuesday night the SEC will officially announce the three annual opponents, plus all nine conference opponents for each team from 2026 to ’29. Some games on the 2026 schedule will be repeat matchups from 2025, with teams playing at the same team they played at this year.
While geography and tradition were emphasized in choosing the annual opponents — 80 percent of the annual matchups are in the same or a contiguous state — the SEC plans to take competitive balance into account in assigning the other six opponents a team will face in conference play each year. For example, Alabama might not get elite teams such as LSU and Texas in the same year.
Competitive balance: Did anyone get off easy?
On the face of it, several teams got a good draw: Florida and Tennessee only get one annual opponent that most would consider a traditional power (Georgia for the Gators, Alabama for the Vols). But it’s hard to know for sure without seeing the entire nine-game schedule, and the other six opponents each year will not be randomly assigned.
The SEC office will use each team’s recent records to try to achieve some competitive balance. Of course, it can’t predict which teams will be better than expected or worse than expected, especially the further away it sets the schedule. That’s another reason the league is only setting the annual opponents and schedule for the next four years and will revisit it all after that.
How things changed
Two years ago, when the SEC prepared for the possibility of going to nine games for the 2024 season, it landed on a list of three annual opponents that slightly differed from what the list will actually be for 2026-29.
- Alabama had LSU rather than Mississippi State. LSU, instead of getting Alabama, now gets Arkansas.
- Georgia and South Carolina were not matched. Georgia instead had Kentucky, while South Carolina had Tennessee.
- Florida and Oklahoma were initially paired together but instead will now get closer annual games: Kentucky for Florida and Ole Miss for Oklahoma.
There were a few other tweaks indicating that the emphasis appeared to be more on geography (the average distance between annual opponents’ campuses is 281 miles) and tradition (10 of the 24 annual matchups are games that have been played 100 or more times).
Another argument against divisions
When the SEC moved away from its divisional format, one of the stated reasons was creating better variety in scheduling. Division play had resulted in stale matchups played every year, while marquee cross-division matchups were played only once a decade — or not at all, as Georgia has still never visited Texas A&M.
In its new structure, the SEC argues it will also achieve better competitive balance in its scheduling. The conference office provided this statistical nugget on the yet-to-be-revealed full nine-game schedules for 2026-29:
- Using team records from 2021 to ’24, the highest average opponent winning percentage for any team’s schedule from 2026 to ’29 will be 55.67 percent, while the lowest is 46.65 percent, a difference of just over 9 percent.
- In the last two years of divisional play (2022-23), the highest average opponent winning percentage for any team was 61.32 percent, and the lowest was 39.76 percent, a difference of more than 21 percent.
Other key details
- Teams not matched as annual opponents will play each other every other year. So teams will not go two years without playing.
- Teams that have four conference home games one season will have five the next (with the exception of the teams in the Florida-Georgia and Oklahoma-Texas neutral-site rivalries).
- Each team still has to play at least one game against a team from the Big Ten, Big 12, ACC or Notre Dame.
(Photo: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)