New 9-game SEC schedule means life gets tougher for Mississippi State Bulldogs

The topic of SEC football scheduling has been discussed ad nauseum for years now, and at long last we have an answer to what format the league will be using going forward in the 16-team era. Starting in 2026, the SEC will move to a 9-game conference schedule.

Each team in the SEC will have three permanent rivals while rotating through the rest of the conference for the remaining six games. This will allow each team to play everyone both home and away in a four year span.

The conference will maintain its current requirement of playing at least one opponent from either the Big Ten, ACC, or Big 12 in the non-conference slate each year, meaning going forward, each SEC team will play at least 10 games against Power 4 opponents annually. The league will continue with a non-divisional structure, with the top two teams in the league standings playing in the SEC Championship Game.

9-game SEC schedule is bad news for Mississippi State football

Make no mistake here: life just got tougher for Mississippi State football.

For as much success as we've seen from the program overall since 2010 (current circumstances notwithstanding), the reality is and almost certainly always will be that the Bulldogs face an uphill battle trying to field a winning team in the SEC.

State simply does not have the history and, more importantly, the resources that much of the rest of the conference does. Those factors dictate the type of talent you're putting on the field each week, and talent, more often than not, is what ultimately dictates your chances of success. The result is that whenever the Bulldogs face off against a fellow SEC institution, odds are their opponent has the more talented team.

Now when MSU has been at its peak as a program, we've seen them knock-off more talented teams with regularity. Talent isn't everything. But even when that was the case, how many times did the Bulldogs manage to post a winning SEC record?

The answer is once, in 2014 with the best coach, best roster, and single best player in program history. Over the last 25 seasons, State has averaged about 2.8 SEC wins per year.

In the previous scheduling format, that would generally be enough that, assuming you handled business in the non-conference, you could make it to bowl games. And that's precisely why MSU managed to reach bowl-eligibility quite frequently, which is the year-over-year goal for the program.

Well now you're losing a non-conference game, the games that have provided the bulk of your wins on the quest to bowl-eligibility. And with the required P4 opponent in the non-conference, you're already not getting a guaranteed win with at least one game (as we've seen with BYU, Kansas State, and Arizona State in recent years).

With nine SEC games plus the one P4 non-conference opponent, MSU is guaranteed just two games a year that, under normal circumstances, are sure-fire wins. The remaining 10 are completely up in the air with regards to difficultly. But again, speaking realistically, you can practically always guarantee a few losses on that slate, and there aren't exactly many P4/SEC games MSU can mark-up as a certain wins.

Basically, when it comes to reaching that baseline goal of becoming bowl-eligible, Mississippi State is going to have a tougher time achieving that. It's just a hard truth that there are going to be more seasons going forward where the Bulldogs don't have an obvious path to finding six wins.

And I'm sure there are many fans who will say that their expectations are higher than just winning six games. They expect the years like we saw under Dan Mullen and Mike Leach where the Bulldogs found themselves jumping into the national conversation.

Can those still happen? Of course, but it's going to be significantly harder for them to. Many of those teams that we saw winning 8-plus games benefitted from significantly weaker schedules than what State will face going forward. It doesn't mean they weren't good teams, but they probably wouldn't be remembered the same way if they had playoff-contenders Texas and Arizona State on the slate as opposed to Troy and Middle Tennessee.

Simply put, the new scheduling format is going to make achieving the goals Mississippi State expects more difficult going forward, potentially much more difficult. Either the Bulldogs have to get significantly better as a program quick, or expectations will have to be adjusted going forward.