HOOVER, Alabama

-- Nick Saban has been

when it pertains to a potential shift from an eight-game to a nine-game conference schedule, but he saved his strongest pitch for Day 3 of SEC Media Days.

The "No. 1 priority" behind whatever the SEC decides, Saban said, should center on affording players the opportunity to play against every conference foe at least once during their respective four-year careers.

"It doesn't matter what division you're in," Saban said to a small group of reporters before his time behind the podium.

"You play at Alabama, you want to play against Florida some time in your career. You want to play against Georgia some time in your career. Same thing with the schools on that side. How do we get to that?"

Adding another SEC game might just be the only solution.

"When you get more teams, you increase the size of the league by 15 percent," he said. "You almost have to play more games. I think that rather than being so division-oriented, what's made this league great is the entire conference, sort of in its entirety."

At the SEC spring meetings, Saban made waves when he said "self-absorbed people" were holding college football back from having the best four teams in a four-team playoff. He used a similar analogy when discussing the potential expansion of the SEC schedule.

"Everybody has an agenda," he said. "The teams that barely qualify for bowl games and get six wins, they don't want to play anymore SEC games. The people that have big, fixed rivalries, which we do, don't want to give that up. Everybody's got sort of a self-indulgent opinion of how it should be done.

"If we have to play nine games, yeah, it's going to be more difficult. How about somebody thinking about the players? I think it's just healthy for the league."

For its current eight-game model, the league

, which gives each team a permanent cross-divisional and rotates a new one on the schedule each year.

Saban said he'd like to see two games rotated on an annual basis. To do that, of course, another game would have to be added.

"If we played nine games, I know that's a problem, you've got five home, four away, I know that's a problem," he said. "You could play one, rotate two so we would play everybody. I think rotating two is the most important thing because that sort of gets it to where you play everybody in a four-year cycle or pretty close. May not be perfect."

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