Vols’ 2024 football schedule has five rivalry games protected

Tennessee Athletics photo by Kate Luffman / Tennessee running back Jabari Small scores a touchdown during last years 38-33 win over Florida. The Volunteers will play the Gators along with fellow rivals Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and Vanderbilt in 2024, when the SEC becomes a 16-member league with the additions of Oklahoma and Texas. Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey said two weeks ago at the league's spring meetings that the 2024 football schedule would honor traditional rivalries. The SEC delivered on that pledge Wednesday night. An overwhelming majority of the league's most prominent matchups were maintained for 2024, when the conference expands to 16 members and eliminates divisions with the additions of Oklahoma and Texas. The league voted to remain at eight conference games for 2024 during the recent gathering in Destin, Florida, while continuing to finalize "a long-term strategy as a 16-team conference." Tennessee's top rivalry games against Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky and Vanderbilt are all protected in the 2024 schedule, with the Volunteers also hosting Mississippi State and traveling to Arkansas and Oklahoma. The pairing of the Vols and Sooners in Norman will be a walk down memory lane for Tennessee coach Josh Heupel, who quarterbacked Oklahoma to the 2000 season's national title. The only annual foes currently on Tennessee's schedule that will not appear in 2024 are Missouri and South Carolina. "I think it's important that you keep traditional rivalries and that you get a chance to play the games that mean a bunch to your fan base and to guys inside your locker room," Heupel said early last month in his visit to Chattanooga for the Big Orange Caravan. Georgia, the two-time reigning national champion, will have the familiar faces of Auburn, Florida and Tennessee on its 2024 schedule, and the Bulldogs will take trips to Alabama and Texas. They were originally supposed to make their first venture to Texas A&M next year, but that journey will have to wait. The most notable matchup disappearing from Georgia's 2024 schedule is its border pairing with South Carolina. The Bulldogs and Gamecocks have played annually since 1974, with the exception of the 1990-91 seasons. Georgia also won't be playing Vanderbilt, which may not be missed too much given that the Bulldogs have won the past two meetings by a combined 117-0. Alabama's 2024 schedule contains its three prominent rivals — Auburn, Tennessee and LSU — but will be without four current divisional members: Arkansas, Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Texas A&M. "We have been engaged in planning for the entry of Oklahoma and Texas into the SEC since the summer of 2021," Sankey said at the spring meetings, "but the change of the membership date from 2025 to 2024 creates scheduling complexities that can better be managed with a one-year schedule. Creating a one-year schedule will provide a longer on-ramp to manage football scheduling around existing nonconference commitments of our members. "It will also provide additional time to understand the impact of an expanded College Football Playoff and engage with our media partners as we determine the appropriate long-term plan." The SEC's most notable rivalry that won't be played in 2024 is Auburn-LSU, with those two sets of Tigers having taken turns as the chief challenger to Nick Saban's Crimson Tide for supremacy in the West. LSU holds an 18-16 edge in the past 34 meetings against Auburn, with six of the past seven contests decided by five or fewer points. Auburn will play both Alabama and Georgia in 2024 but will not face either Mississippi State or Ole Miss for the first time since 1936. Also going away will be two permanent cross-divisional pairings that have occurred since the SEC went to a divisional format in 1992: Kentucky-Mississippi State and Vanderbilt-Ole Miss. The 2024 SEC schedule required that every current league team would play either Oklahoma or Texas and that no school traveling to another league campus this season would have to return to the same campus next year. Adding Oklahoma and Texas was certain to evoke rivalries of yesteryear and create some unique encounters, and both will be accomplished in 2024. Texas will travel to Arkansas and Texas A&M in addition to hosting Georgia, while Oklahoma gets to host Alabama and travels to Missouri, LSU and Auburn. The SEC used bridge schedules during the 2012 and 2013 seasons, which were the first two years Missouri and Texas A&M were in the league to form a 14-member conference. The league has debated sticking with eight games moving forward in which every team would have one permanent opponent and seven that would rotate for two contests during a four-year stretch. A nine-game model also being discussed would contain three permanent opponents, which would protect annual rivalries such as Alabama-