Clemson vs. Auburn

Former Auburn coach Pat Dye on the sidelines Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016, before an NCAA football game against Clemson at Jordan-Hare Stadium in Auburn, Ala. (Julie Bennett/jbennett@al.com)

Add former Auburn football coach Pat Dye to the list of SEC football observers who believes the conference's divisional alignment is out of whack.

Dye made an appearance on the Paul Finebaum Show Monday, during which he argued that Auburn and Missouri should switch divisions. That is, Auburn should move to the SEC East and Missouri to the SEC West.

However, Dye isn't advocating for changing the SEC's alignment in order to help Auburn. He said he's doing so because the current set-up is unfair to Missouri.

"Just think about the inconvenience of the Missouri fans having to travel to the East to watch games on the road, of the families that want to go watch their children play," Dye said. "It just makes no sense for Missouri to be in the East.

"(Auburn is) on the Eastern part of Alabama. We're 30 miles from Georgia. We touch Florida and Tennessee, and we need to be in the East. And Missouri needs to be in the West. They could build traditional games with people that are closer to them, where the fans could travel. ... It's a tremendous disadvantage to Missouri being in the East."

Missouri and Texas A&M joined the SEC in 2012, with the Tigers being placed in the East and the Aggies in the West. The other 12 SEC schools remained in the same divisions they had been in since the league first split into East and West when Arkansas and South Carolina joined the conference in 1992.

The current set-up was approved in order to help preserve inter-division rivalry games, such as Georgia-Auburn and Tennessee-Alabama. Because SEC teams play only one permanent rival from the other division, Alabama could not play both Tennessee and Auburn every year if the Tigers moved to the East.

However, adding a ninth SEC game each season could help alleviate that problem. Alabama coach Nick Saban has advocated such a position in the past, and Dye said he agrees with Saban "100 percent."

"We (state of Alabama) touch Florida, Georgia and Tennessee," Dye said. "We need to be in the East, and Missouri needs to be in the West. If we played nine games, we could do it. Because we could still play Alabama every year, and we'd still have our rivalry with Tennessee and Florida and Georgia like we've always had."

As for the position that adding another conference game would lead to more losses and thus jeopardize SEC teams' bowl chances, Dye dismissed that idea out of hand.

"If you can't win three games in the conference playing nine games, you don't deserve to go to a bowl game," Dye said. "The other three games can be somebody you can beat, hopefully. If you can't win three of those kind, if you're in the Southeastern Conference, you don't deserve to go."

Whatever danger there was of more potential losses would be offset by ticket sales, Dye said. SEC teams typically play a patsy -- often an FCS school -- in their fourth non-conference game, which has led to plenty of no-shows in the stands.

"Your fans would love it," Dye said. "They would much rather see you play an LSU or Tennessee or Florida or somebody in the Southeastern Conference than they had see you play Louisiana-Monroe. ... If you played another conference game, it would increase the ticket sales. Nobody wants to come to those other four games. They just come because they're in the habit of coming. You can talk about Auburn, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, LSU ... they've all got empty seats in the stadium when they play those teams. They are sellouts because they sell all the season tickets."

You can listen to the full Pat Dye interview HERE.