This is an opinion column.

You know you’re a long-time student of Auburn and SEC football if you watched the 2024 conference schedule reveal and noticed something beyond Oklahoma’s inaugural visit to the Plains and brutal road trips to Athens and Tuscaloosa per usual in an even-numbered year.

Something was missing beyond a date with LSU, one of the more electric, dramatic and psychotic annual series gifted to us by the league’s expansion to 12 teams and two divisions in 1992.

It was the entire state of Mississippi. No Ole Miss for the first time since 1989. No Mississippi State for the first time since 1954.

Given that the Rebels and Bulldogs have a chance to do something this year that they’ve never done – sweep the Tigers for a second straight season – that may not be a bad thing.

Auburn hired Hugh Freeze, in part, to compete with Alabama and Georgia, the two programs at the top of the college football food chain, who happen to be the school’s two biggest rivals. That’s not an impossible dream, but the recruiting gap that’s tilted the Iron Bowl heavily toward Tuscaloosa and the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry even more dramatically toward Athens won’t be narrowed significantly overnight.