From a strategic standpoint, playing a tough early conference game and a late season easy game just makes too much sense. Why should the SEC change that strategy even with 9 games?
1. It’s early in the season and people are excited just to have football. So while most teams are playing shitty OOC have prime matchups spread over the first 3 weeks. Eyeballs.
2. losing early doesn’t hurt as bad, people have short memories and gives time for the loser to recover in rankings. Who really wants to see Bama/LSU play late then rematch in the MNC? If they played early and the loser seems to improve over the season, a rematch is more palatable. Expanded playoff is going to provide for a lot more rematches, so we will see what kind of fuckery comes from it.
3. late lesson easy game lets teams rest and heal, spread them over 3 weeks and there’s still plenty of good matchups for the TVs.
4. If the conference as a whole is getting a win while the other conferences are going .500 there is going to be favorable movement in the polls as losers drop in rank.
The late season cupcake is a large part of the SEC myth along with 8 conference games. That myth that began while we were good has turned into reality with SEC winning 12 of the last 16. It helps when they get 2 teams into a 4 team playoff or both slots in the BCS MNC which has happened multiple times, and the SEC myth helped that happen.
if we went back to the early 2000s when the B12 was arguably the strongest conference AND if we had competent leadership who decided to adopt those strategies, realignment would probably look a lot different right now.