Atlanta – For years, in professional sports, leagues have played games across the pond in London and now just next door in Mexico.
While it was a bit of an older tradition in the early 1990s, college football has gone back to Dublin, Ireland for the past three years, and now Iowa State and Kansas State are set to face off for a Week 0 match up.
With these games being played outside of college towns it poses the question – can SEC football make its way to other countries.
The short-term answer: no. SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey was quick to decide that, saying, “the strength of our conference is based on our communities. That may not be the same for others, but if you look at the 16 cities that host our universities, the football stadiums, the infrastructure, and what happens on a game day weekend, it's absolutely magnificent, second to none.”
And it’s very much true. The SEC ranked number one in attendance, not just in football but across all major sports. Some towns in the SEC have populations as small as 24,000 and these teams are all they really have.
The economics behind an SEC gameday are also often more important to these communities, making every home game count.
As Commissioner Sankey would put it, “When you take a football stadium with 100,000 fans and the economics around that football game being played in that stadium and that community and then you transfer those someplace else, it's a lot easier to do that if a program's attendance is 20,000, 30,000, or their football stadium is that size.”
However, Sankey did hint at the possibility of an SEC team going international if it would positively impact that team. Sankey mentioned, “Personally, I'd welcome that chance, and we'll continue to explore opportunities, but I'll go back to the importance of college football in our region, in our states, and in our communities.”