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The annual SEC Spring Meetings in Destin, Fla. are underway and with it has come the announcement of part of CBS’ lineup ahead of the 2019 season.
On Wednesday, the SEC on CBS posted a video via Twitter that featured three games that would be carried by the network this fall.
The best games from the SEC are back on CBS.
— SEConCBS (@SEConCBS) May 29, 2019
The 2019 broadcast windows for college football’s highest-rated television package have been announced: https://t.co/FBSqaK7fZA pic.twitter.com/9pG3qxyMkm
While the Florida-Georgia game making the 3:30 time slot on Nov. 2, as well as the SEC Championship game taking place at 4:00 p.m. on Dec. 7 comes as no surprise, there are a few doubleheaders during the season that could have an effect on Tennessee’s schedule.
On Sept. 21 and Nov. 16, CBS will air a 3:30 and 8:00 p.m. game. Tennessee will travel to Gainesville to take on Florida on Sept. 21.
The consensus is that the primetime contest on that day will be Georgia vs Notre Dame in Athens, leaving the 3:30 slot open to possibly Florida-Tennessee and Auburn-Texas A&M.
Other conference games that day include LSU at Vanderbilt, Kentucky at Mississippi State and South Carolina at Missouri.
Ole Miss plays host to California for a non-conference Power Five game, but it would be unlikely that CBS would air back-to-back SEC vs non-conference games that day.
Of course, a lot depends on how these teams performs through the first three weeks of the season, but looking ahead, those games between Florida-Tennessee in the Swamp and Auburn-Texas A&M at Kyle Field seem to be the biggest marquee matchups going on in the conference outside of Georgia-Notre Dame Pt. II.
What makes this interesting is that it could be breaking a long-standing tradition for the annual Florida-Tennessee rivalry, which has aired on CBS all but three times since 1996.
Those three games were aired on ESPN twice in 2012 and 2018 and once on the SEC Network in 2014, while all games played in Gainesville have been exclusively on CBS every year since 1997.
The last time a Florida-Tennessee game took place in Gainesville that wasn’t aired on CBS was 1995. That game was carried by ABC with the late Keith Jackson getting the call.
Could the Vols be heading to Florida for a night game in the Swamp for the first time since 2005? It will be interesting to see how the network fills out its schedule before and during the season.