Hopefully you weren’t looking forward to any marquee non-conference matchups in college football this season, because there won’t be any.

The SEC announced Thursday night that this year’s schedule will be conference-only, joining the Big 10, ACC, and PAC 12 in keeping all 2020 play in-house. As a result, we’ve lost the following games:

  • Alabama/USC
  • Florida/Florida State
  • Georgia/Georgia Tech
  • LSU/Texas
  • South Carolina/Clemson
  • Tennessee/Oklahoma

A couple of long-running SEC/ACC rivalries in there that aren’t going to be played this year. The conference says it’s 10-game schedule will begin on September 26th, and since teams typically play eight conference opponents, they’ll add two more in addition to the six divisional foes, one permanent cross-division rival, and a rotating cross-divisional game.

This leaves the Big 12 as the lone Power Five conference that has yet to make an announcement, though school presidents will be meeting Monday. The problem with the B12 is that it’s the smallest of the major conferences, with only ten teams, so if you did the typical round-robin of conference-only games, each team would only have nine opponents. There’s a rumor that independent BYU would join for this year only, to create a ten-game schedule.

While the prospect of college football looks very iffy to begin with, playing conference-only schedules would still get us classic rivalry games like Bama/Auburn, Ohio State/Michigan, and OU/Texas. SEC football is good enough to warrant your viewing time without any OOC games at all. Notre Dame, as much as I can’t stand them, adds intrigue to the ACC schedule. And if we miraculously improve protocol as the season progresses, maybe we do a half-assed bowl schedule or get some type of postseason play.

Fingers crossed!