The horse race continues in Destin with the Nos. 8 and 9 entering the stretch run.

The number of league football games to be played moving forward remains a dominant storyline as SEC spring meetings enter a second day at the gulf-side resort on Florida’s panhandle.

A majority of league coaches offered their views Tuesday on whether they should still with eight or move to nine. There was nuance — at least in their comments to reporters — with a fair share of fence-sitting or waiting to see where the wind blows.

Zooming out, this is a conversation that comes with different considerations and priorities from all parties involved from coaches to ADs and ultimately the university presidents who get the actual vote. What matters to the fans at home and the leadership in Destin often align but there are different stakes involved.

And that’s where the comments from Tuesday offered a window into that thought process. The self-preservation factor can’t be ignored and the fear of the unknown are hurdles to moving immediately to a nine-game SEC slate.

Auburn coach Hugh Freeze was asked a few questions about this and answers expressed that hesitancy. Having the College Football Playoff expanding from four to 12 teams in 2024 — the same year as the new SEC model would begin — was at the top of mind for Freeze.

“Are you guys going to put us in with three losses if we run the table on everybody else?” Freeze said. “Those are the things we’re going to think about as coaches. How do we best position ourselves while satisfying our fans? I love coaching in big games.”

Keeping an eight-game model, at least as it’s proposed now, would eliminate annual rivalries like Auburn-Georgia and Alabama-Tennessee. There would be just one annual opponent for each school (the Iron Bowl, obviously) with a rotation of seven others in that structure. Moving to that model would end a string for those two series that have been played every year since 1944.

Again, when asked about the Georgia game specifically, Freeze weighed it with the playoff considerations.

“From a football coach’s perspective, the biggest question I would have is as important as those games are to us, how does the playoff look at it?” he said. “If you’re an SEC opponent and you’re really quality and won a lot of good games but you dropped two games to top teams or a third one, do you still get in when the playoff expands? I think all of those are unknowns.”

Nick Saban, long a nine-game proponent, shifted more toward an eight-game preference in a recent interview with Sports Illustrated. The nine-game model would have three annual opponents with the other six rotating. There was apprehension when Alabama was matched with Auburn, Tennessee and LSU when speaking with SI.

Saban on Tuesday listed other concerns.

“I think one of the more difficult things with going to nine games is we’ve tried to schedule two out-of-conference, Power 5 games to try to improve our strength of schedule,” Saban said. “Over the next, I don’t know, seven, eight, nine, 10 years, and if we go to nine games, we’ll have to unwind that. So my deal was always to play more SEC games because we couldn’t get other people to schedule. So now I think there are more people in tune to scheduling, so having a balance is probably the most important thing.”

Alabama has two non-conference Power 5 opponents under contract every year from 2025 through 2034.

“I still am always of the opinion that we should play all Division-I games,” Saban said Tuesday. “I’ve said this for years. So whether there are 60 teams in the Power 5 conferences or 70 teams or however many there are, that it’s better for fans it’s better for strength of schedule that we all play all Power 5 games. So however we get to that. I think that’s the best thing.”

How that scheduling effort is taken into consideration by a playoff committee looking to expand the reach of the event is one of those unknown factors facing leadership and the strategy with scheduling.

“For us,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said Tuesday, “with an eight- or nine-game schedule we will still carry forward multiple teams being under full consideration. If you look at how last year ended, it shows the strength of the conference.”

The SEC had three of the top six teams in the final CFP standings last year with eventual-national champ Georgia as the top seed. Two of the top 12 teams had three losses but a committee picking a 12-team field likely wouldn’t take the same approach to ranking as one working with four slots.

That unknown is what keeps coaches anxious when adding another SEC game with a higher degree of difficulty to an already daunting schedule.

And that’s how rivalry games that would have once seemed untouchable could no longer be annual affairs.

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.