Mississippi State Football: What will the Bulldogs schedule look like in the SEC?

With Texas and Oklahoma slated to join the SEC in 2024, changes are coming to the league’s football scheduling model. What teams will be annual fixtures on Mississippi State’s football schedule?

Changes are on the way to Mississippi State Football’s annual schedule. Two years ago, Texas and Oklahoma announced their stunning exit from the Big 12 conference to join the SEC, sending shockwaves through the college athletics universe. The two programs were under contract with the Big 12 through the 2024 football season, and despite initial reports that they would have to fulfill the entirety of that contract, word broke on February 9 that the blue-bloods would be joining the SEC a year early.

In 2024, the Longhorns and Sooners will be members of the SEC. With the league growing to 16 teams, the current 8-game East-West divisional model used for football will no longer suffice. Complaints have already been running rampant for years about how the SEC’s current scheduling model doesn’t allow for enough regular meetings between teams in opposite divisions. Simply putting the two new teams into divisions would make matters worse.

The SEC, instead, is going to ditch divisions altogether and create an entirely different model for how it constructs each team’s annual schedule. While not yet finalized, the SEC will almost certainly adopt a 9-game conference schedule featuring three permanent and six rotating opponents. This will allow for schools to play each team in the league both home and away over a four-year span.

The days of Mississippi State playing its current SEC West brethren will be gone each year. But also gone will be the days of Mississippi State playing any current SEC East teams not named Kentucky only once every six years. The new format will mean the Bulldogs face off against each of the remaining 15 SEC programs on a regular basis. But who will be the teams that remain permanent fixtures on their schedule?

It’s blatantly obvious who one of State’s three permanent opponents will be. Mississippi State will absolutely continue playing Ole Miss annually on rivalry weekend. The college football world cannot continue without the shenanigans of the Egg Bowl each Thanksgiving (regardless of what some folks in Oxford like to claim).

But what about the other two? Mississippi State is in an interesting spot as it only has one true, must-be-played rival in the Rebels. While the Bulldogs have plenty of history with several SEC members outside of Ole Miss, none of those series ever developed into major rivalries, at least not in football. Because of this, who MSU gets paired up with for their permanent opponents could go in any number of directions.

The other reason this could go several different ways is because we do not yet know how the SEC will determine permanent opponents. What criteria will be used for choosing which games are played annually? Number of games played? If so, Alabama and LSU may very well be paired with the Bulldogs. But if competitiveness is a heavy factor, you could swap them out for the likes of Kentucky or Texas A&M. How much will geography play into the decision? Will both schools have to want the game to be played? Or is the SEC simply going to pick games that will lead to the best matchups and therefore get the most TV viewership? If I were a betting man, I’d say that last option will likely play a big role. But ultimately, it’s impossible to know for sure who the SEC will pair up for their future schedules. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t try and narrow down the options that make the most sense for MSU.

In this series, I’ll dive into the various candidates for Mississippi State’s permanent SEC rivals and why they do or don’t make sense. And at the end, I’ll make my prediction for which teams I believe will end up a part of the Bulldog’s annual schedule. Check out Part 2, where I break down the most obvious options to become State’s annual rivals.