This isn’t an easy schedules, but SEC schedules aren’t supposed to be easy. But for the expansion, South Carolina would have had Arkansas and Mississippi State coming to Columbia along with a trip to LSU. Since Missouri is now coming to Columbia one of those SEC West games had to go. I assume the SEC didn’t want to break up our incredibly important and meaningful rivalry with Arkansas, so they had to remove the Mississippi State return trip. That does make some sense.
Allow me to dive deeper into this issue…
South Carolina lost out on its traditional week 2 match up with Georgia. There has been some scuttlebutt indicating Georgia wasn’t a fan of the positioning of that game. I’m not sure how substantive those rumors are, but after losing in back-to-back seasons, I’m sure the Bulldogs are fine with the change. I enjoyed using that game as a barometer of each season’s Gamecock team, but I don’t care too much about it going away.
The real complaint most Gamecocks fans should have is the favorable hand Georgia has been dealt, again. As you may recall, Georgia advanced to the SEC championship game in 2011 in large part due to the fact that their SEC West schedule was incredibly easy.
For the 2012 slate, Georgia adds Missouri onto their schedule and got to side step Alabama. Rather than curtail their current rotating home and home (like South Carolina did), Georgia gets to finish their series with Ole Miss. No offense intended to Ole Miss, but they aren’t Alabama, Arkansas or LSU. Neither is Auburn, Georgia’s other opponent.
In the end Georgia gets an easier road again. That’s all. USC still controls its own destiny and a win over Georgia would give Carolina a mulligan to get to Atlanta. It probably doesn’t give them two. Then again, maybe Georgia will go ahead and lose to someone else and make this schedule difficulty talk mostly moot.
If you’re still feeling shafted by the schedule, remember two things:
1) It will probably change drastically in 2013, for better or worse so don’t get too use to it.
2) At least we don’t have Ole Miss’s or Auburn’s schedules.
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*Do check out our other writings on this subject – South Carolina Football: Thoughts on Released 2012 Schedule with Predictions and/or USC’s 2012 SEC Football Schedule .
