Pastides says fan support favors Aggies
With two new schools in the SEC, the league athletics directors recommended to the school presidents that South Carolina and Arkansas switch cross-divisional rivals, matching the Gamecocks with Texas A&M.
USC President Harris Pastides was in favor of the idea, but he wasn’t quite ready to commit to a new permanent western opponent starting in 2013.
“I think a lot of times we make decisions and we don’t consult the fans,” Pastides told The Daily Gamecock recently. “I just wanted to know what the fan sentiment would be, so we agreed to delay the final vote for a couple of weeks.”
After reaching out to the fans, Pastides is ready to make the call to have the Aggies the new cross- divisional rival instead of Arkansas, though no official vote has taken place. Pastides said that he spoke to the Texas A&M university president at the regularly scheduled meeting Thursday in Atlanta and he also seemed in favor of the switch, as did Arkansas and Missouri, who will now be paired with each other if the move is approved. Each school in the SEC has a permanent football opponent that it is paired with annually in the opposite division.
The presidents will be meeting in the near future, though Pastides is still unsure of the date, at which point they will vote to switch the permanent opponents for the four schools. Pastides said the other teams in the SEC were not interested in swapping cross-divisional rivals.
“South Carolina and Arkansas were the two — before Texas A&M and Missouri — newer schools to come in, so we kind of were given to each other or assigned to each other at that point,” Pastides said. “The other schools have preexisting rivalries, and they’re very important to their fan base, so I think nobody was interested in swapping those rivalries. I think what we had was the choice of keeping Arkansas or taking A&M.”
Pastides said Athletics Director Eric Hyman was in favor of the change, though he doesn’t recall a specific conversation with USC football coach Steve Spurrier. One of the things that Pastides liked about the change was being able to recruit more students, not necessarily student-athletes, from the state of Texas.
As far as traveling to Texas for fans, Pastides knows that he didn’t necessarily make an upgrade from Arkansas, but he doesn’t feel the Gamecocks downgraded in that department either.
“I don’t know that we’re that much further,” Pastides said. “Arkansas is not an easy place to get to for fans — they don’t have a major airport there. I’m always sensitive to that, but to be honest with you, I think we’re the eastern-most school in the SEC East, and it was going to be hard to get a Western division opponent that was close. It just doesn’t exist.”
Another thing that will need to be voted on, either at the next meeting or a future one, is if the SEC will move to a nine-game conference schedule or if it will stay with the current eight-game conference schedule.
“That one’s pretty much been decided, though we did not vote yet,” Pastides said. “There was a recommendation from the athletics directors that we not add a ninth game. I think most of the teams are saying that we play in the most competitive conference. Eight games against SEC teams is plenty, and so we have the option of picking up a ninth game, but the ADs recommended we stay with eight, and I think the presidents are pretty unanimous about it.”