Quote Originally Posted by Johnson85 View Post
You can do three permanents, but most people you see listing rivalries they want to maintain are big names. Nobody gives a shit who Vandy plays. And they really don't give that much of a shit who State or Ole Miss plays. So if you find permanent rivals for Vandy, Mizzou, UK, etc., and you try to make schedules reasonably balanced, you end up with something that will look a lot like the pods. There is some additional flexibility with the permanent opponents approach, I'm just not sure it's going to be as different from the pod approach as people imagine.

You're just not going to keep for example, Bama having Auburn, UT, and LSU as permanents. You're going to pick the two most important and then you're going to have to spread out the teams that don't have rivalries people care about so that everybody has three permanents.

I mean, I'd love it if the TV partners convinced the SEC that they would pay more if they would make Bama play UGA, Auburn, and LSU as permanents and let us have Ole Miss, UK, and Vandy as permanents, but I think the big name schools are going to resist loading up their schedule. But I could be wrong. They basically matched up strengths with the prior permanent opponents, with Ole getting Vandy, us getting UK, Ark getting USCe (prior to expansion). I'm just not sure they're going to want three blue blood matchups every year plus a reasonable chance of drawing a fourth or even fifth from the remaining teams.
Even if you only pick two rivalries for each team that most care about, the three permanent approach is still better than pods.

No system is going to make everyone happy, but the rigidity of pods is going to make fewer people happy than if you just assigned sensible permanent opponents.

If it ends up close to being pods fine, but giving up several classic matchups and having a little less competitive balance just for the sake of doing this media trendy thing called "pods" doesn't make any sense.