What Tennessee football removing OU from 2024 schedule means for SEC

Is the SEC expanding earlier than we thought? That certainly seems to be the case with the instructions the league gave Tennessee football and the Georgia Bulldogs Wednesday. Things may be about to get a heck of a lot tougher.

The SEC released a statement telling UGA and the Vols to postpone their scheduled matchups with the Oklahoma Sooners in 2023 and 2024 respectively since they wouldn’t be able to fill their home-and-home obligations before OU joined the SEC. They are set to join with the Texas Longhorns in 2025.

Georgia has already replaced Oklahoma with the Ball State Cardinals, who Tennessee football just ironically beat. However, Danny White released a statement that reveals the Vols don’t yet have a replacement and suggests that they weren’t prepared for the news.

Reading deeper into that, if UT wasn’t ready for it, then the move suggests the SEC is going to add OU and Texas before 2025. After all, we knew from the start that the Vols and OU wouldn’t be able to fulfill their obligations before that set expansion year, so why did it take another year for this story to come out?

Although Georgia seemed to already have a replacement lined up, that replacement being Ball State, a Group of Five team, suggests they had to scramble. As a result, they don’t appear to have been that prepared for this move either, and the same also holds true for OU.

It seems as if Tennessee football, Georgia and Oklahoma were all content to just have this one-game series and move on before the SEC added them in 2025. The Vols’ series with them was supposed to begin with a trip to Norman, Okla., in 2020, but COVID obviously canceled that. They were set to play at Neyland in 2024 on Sept. 7.

Taking that into account, although it’s all speculation, the signs point to the SEC expanding earlier. Will the expand in 2023? Given the fact that UGA took OU off the schedule, that seems to be a possibility, but it also seems to be a possibility for 2024.

Why would the league get involved in these contracts anyway? Isn’t it up to OU if they want to play those games. After all, they’re obviously void when OU joins the league, and OU would back out of the second game anyway as to avoid an extra Power Five matchup.

Either way, this would be a stroke of fate against the Vols. Honestly, 2024 seemed like their best window to break the SEC Championship drought with Nico Iamaleava in his second year at quarterback by then and Josh Heupel’s system fully in place.

However, if the league adds OU and Texas then, well, it might turn into a 30-year drought since their last SEC Championship, which came in 1998, when the league was only six years into having just 12 teams. After all, the 16-team SEC with those two schools is going to be brutal, particularly if Texas takes off with Steve Sarkisian.

Of course, this is all speculation, but Tennessee football may have to share the SEC with Heupel’s alma mater and another UT program that wears orange earlier than anybody thought. We still don’t know if that’s true, but pay attention to any possible announcements by the league in the coming days.