Oklahoma AD Joe Castiglione talks SEC schedule, future non-conference opponents
OKLAHOMA CITY – For Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione, the move to the SEC is starting to feel a little more real.
Castiglione spent last week at the SEC annual league meetings in Florida. Oklahoma will officially join the conference in the summer of 2024 – a year earlier than previously intended. But OU is already starting to attend meetings as the conference prepares for it and Texas.
“I think this meeting more than any other felt that way primarily because more of the conference membership was there. Football coaches were there. The men’s and women’s basketball coaches were there,” Castiglione told SoonerScoop.com Saturday at the Women’s College World Series. “It’s the first meeting we’ve been to where we’ve all been at the same place. I’ve only attended a few of the AD-only meetings. And those meetings were the ones that were specifically directed toward the future of the conference. Although we weren’t and still aren’t a voting member, they felt really natural.
“People were very welcoming. You see how hard they work to bring everybody together. It went very smoothly.”
This meeting had particular significance as they voted on how many conference football games the league would play in 2024. The league voted for eight over nine, with a majority vote of 9-5. They also decided to abandon the two divisions, with the top two teams in the standings playing in the championship game. And long-time rivalries aren’t going anywhere, including OU-Texas in Dallas. Oklahoma will learn its 2024 SEC opponents on June 14 on SEC Network.
Oklahoma and Texas cannot vote yet, but both are on the record saying they prefer nine conference games, as has been standard in the Big 12 since 2011. And there is still belief it will eventually be nine games after the inaugural season in 2024.
“We’ve talked a long time about nine conference games. We’re used to playing nine in the Big 12,” Castiglione said. “But in this particular case, I think playing more of the conference membership is good for all of us and our partners and the fans. But that doesn’t mean eight won’t work. It works. I think that the decision was appropriate given the complexity of some of the transitional elements that we don’t talk much about.
“I feel like nine is definitely on the table for the future. And it’ll continue to be a discussion as we move forward. Who knows, maybe sometime during the coming year there will be a vote for 2025 or beyond. It is set up to transition to either another year of eight conference games or to move to nine. All those scheduling models are in place, whichever we vote as a conference.”
The complex transitional elements Castiglione is referring to are vast. But there are three main sticking points as to why the conference stayed at eight games for 2024.
The first is that many teams in the SEC already have their 2024 non-conference schedules set and changing them now would be a financial issue due to contractual agreements. The second is the expanded College Football Playoff, which will go from four to 12 teams starting in 2024, and how playing more conference games could affect how many teams get in, positively or negatively. And the third – the one “we don’t talk much about” – is if ESPN is willing to pay more for more conference games.
In the end, there were too many unknowns for other schools to want to make the change.
“There’s a lot of moving parts to this,” Castiglione said. “The current membership has to get out of games they already contracted to have and there are financial penalties to that. There are still some elements around the expanded playoff that aren’t fully baked yet and maybe gave some pause. And there are several things the conference moving to that want to make sure the transition is right. It just seemed, in the room, that there was just a little too much uncertainty. Some didn’t feel comfortable moving to nine yet.”
Potential 2024 non-conference opponents
Part of the decision to play eight conference games is the requirement for each team to play at least one team from the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, or a major independent in 2024. That’s an issue for Oklahoma, which currently only has Tulane and Temple –both in Norman – as its non-conference opponents.
This isn’t new a issue for Castiglione, though. Just last year he scrambled to find OU a non-conference opponent. Due to the move to the SEC, Oklahoma won’t play Georgia in 2023.
“A lot of people have amnesia about what we went through barely a year ago when we had to replace the Georgia game,” Castiglione said. “We were really lucky to find SMU. Now people are looking at the 2023 schedule and criticizing it like we intended to schedule it like that. I’m very grateful that SMU agreed to come play. There weren’t many FBS options at all. In fact, I could count them on one hand.
“So we’re going to be in a little bit of a tough spot to figure this out. I actually enjoy this challenge because I’ve had them quite a few times over my career. More than I can count where games we had scheduled and people dropped on short notice. Now you have to find a way to make things work. If you only knew some of the paths I had to follow to get certain games, you wouldn’t believe it.”
One of those games was a matchup with Army in 2020, which would have taken place at West Point. And Castiglione isn’t ruling it out as a possibility now in 2024.
Army would count as a major independent to fulfill the Power 5 requirement.
“They didn’t have the opportunity when we talked to them after the pandemic. They didn’t have the opening when talked a couple of years ago. But maybe something’s changed. So we’ll take a look. We also have to have another home game. So we’ll see.”
Castiglione hopes to have the two open slots filled soon. Right now, the Power 5 teams with openings in 2024 include Washington (Pac-12), Northwestern (Big Ten), Rutgers (Big Ten), Boston College (ACC), N.C. State (ACC), Duke (ACC), Houston (Big 12), and TCU (Big 12). Of note is that Oklahoma State does not have an opening, and won’t for some time, leaving the future of Bedlam football unknown.
“(Programs) don’t necessarily call us. There are some that might,” Castiglione said. “And to be fair, I’ve had some calls about looking to see if we were going to schedule a team. But getting a (Power 5) opponent is the toughest part because those schedules are already generally set and have been set for a couple of years. There may be one wiggle free. We’ll see.”
While Castiglione attempts to finalize Oklahoma’s 2024 schedule, he’s equally as invested in OU’s final season in the Big 12. Announced this past week were kickoff times for four of Oklahoma’s 2023 games. It included two 11 a.m. start times – the home opener against Arkansas State on Sept. 2 and the home finale against TCU the day after Thanksgiving.
When asked about the kickoff times, Castiglione laughed, paused for a few seconds and said, “They are what they are.”
One more year, Joe. One more year.
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