Texas A&M is traveling to LSU this weekend to take on Lane Kiffin’s Tigers for their first road trip of this young season, and they are in need of a win in the worst way. Wins are hard to come by for the visitors in Tiger Stadium, however— the Aggies got their first win in Baton Rouge as a member of the SEC only last year.
Even though they traveled to face off with LSU last season, though, they are doing so again for the second straight season. This is highly irregular for a conference opponent— the normal pattern is to swap back and forth, year by year, so that there is an even split of home and away games.
Indeed, up until this year, that is the pattern that the Aggies have followed in their games against the Tigers. Starting with the game at Kyle Field in 2012, A&M and LSU have rotated between College Station and Baton Rouge every year up until this one— so what gives?
SEC’s scheduling shift has now given Texas A&M a raw deal with LSU matchup
It all has to do with the SEC’s shift to a nine-game conference schedule this past offseason. The SEC had to move away from a divisional model when Texas and Oklahoma joined the conference, scrapping the old East and West divisions, thanks in large part to the impracticality of either 1) putting Texas or Oklahoma in the SEC East or 2) switching an existing SEC West team to the East.
The conference decided to just give each team an eight-game conference schedule in 2024 and then the same schedule once again in 2025, only with the home and road splits swapped. This past offseason, though, they bumped up the number of conference games from eight to nine— and that caused quite a few more changes.
The way the schedule works now is that each team has three permanent opponents that they will see every year, with their six other conference opponents rotating. That means that a given program will play every other program in the conference over a two-year period— which solves some of the big issues people had with the former scheduling model, i.e. a lack of variety.
However, as with any shift in scheduling philosophy, there are some quirks that needed to be ironed out— and this is where this oddity with the Aggies and LSU comes in. A&M’s three permanent opponents assigned by the conference are Texas, LSU, and Missouri— and the Aggies played away games against each of these teams in 2025, the final year of the eight-game conference schedule.
So, the SEC was faced with a decision between two options: 1) Texas A&M’s three permanent opponents will always either be all home games or all away games in a given year, or 2) have the Aggies play away games against one or two these opponents two times in a row in 2025 and 2026.
The conference elected to go with the second option, having the Texas game rotate like normal to be played at Kyle Field this year, and keeping the Missouri and LSU games as away games. There’s some logic to their decision, of course: if the Aggies wouldn’t want to have to travel to both Austin and Baton Rouge in a given year on a regular basis, so those are staggered.
But the upshot for the Aggies here is that they now have the misfortune of having to venture back to Death Valley for a second straight year. Things would look a lot different right now for the Aggies if they were playing LSU at home, in all honesty: there would be a heck of a lot more optimism about how this game might go, with A&M needing a win pretty badly.
You can only play the games that are in front of you, of course, and I doubt Elko or anyone else in the building is bemoaning that they have to do this. But for those fans who may have been confused about why the Aggies are going to Death Valley for the second year in a row, there you have it.
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