The Southeastern Conference keeps building add-ons to the mansion.





The SEC Network was announced May 2, a full-immersion media initiative that will close the revenue gap between America's best football conference and America's most lucrative TV conference (the Big Ten). The College Football Playoff is coming, and no league figures to gain more financially from that than the SEC. And there is one other underrated cash geyser soon to begin spraying the SEC's way – its whopper of a deal with the Big 12 to basically co-opt the Sugar Bowl, with ESPN paying a reported $80 million a year to televise.

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That is new money and a new concept – not quite cutting out the middleman that is the bowl, but taking control of the property and the vast majority of the cash.

"We created what I might call a paradigm shift," commissioner Mike Slive said Thursday on the "Wetzel To Forde" show on Yahoo! Sports Radio.

And the $80 million annually in TV money that comes along with that shift?

"We were comfortable with the amount," he said, chuckling.

In SliveSpeak that translates to, "We're making out like bandits with this deal."

[Related: Alabama spent $3.4 million to attend the BCS title game in Miami]

Now here is the byproduct of the rich getting richer: There is no longer a viable excuse for the rich not to play a nine-game conference schedule. The SEC mansion needs quality competitive furnishings, not knock-offs from the FCS thrift store.

The Pac-12 is doing it now. So is the 10-team Big 12, which doesn't have a title game and doesn't need one with everyone playing every opponent in the regular season. The Big Ten formally announced last month that it is headed to nine games in 2016.

So the ACC and SEC should join the movement. Especially the SEC.

There is backlash to that, of course.

You've heard a lot of caterwauling from coaches, who would love eight SEC opponents and four games against Cadaver Tech if it were the difference between 5-7 and a berth in a bowl – any bowl. You've heard some grousing from athletic directors, who say they need a guaranteed seven home games a year to make ends meet financially. You've heard coaches and athletic directors doomsaying about the physical toll of one more week in the meat grinder of league play.

Now hear this: Every SEC team should play a nine-game league schedule, with one decent non-conference opponent and two creampuff home games. Anything less and the league is cheating itself and its fans.

"I'm open-minded and I want to hear the discussions," Slive said, adding that the topic is sure to come up for the second year in a row at the league's annual spring meetings in Destin, Fla.

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The reasons it should happen are abundant and obvious.

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