SEC commissioner Greg Sankey confirmed Monday that he’s in favor of his conference going to a nine-game football schedule. That declaration, the furthest Sankey has seemed to go publicly, came with a caveat: as long as it doesn’t hurt SEC teams trying to get in the College Football Playoff.
The SEC has debated going to nine games for several years, especially in the lead-up to Oklahoma and Texas joining the conference, which happened last season. But financial and competitive concerns led to the conference staying at eight games, at least temporarily.
Behind the scenes, Sankey has voiced support for going to nine games. While confirming that on Monday during an appearance on the SEC Network, Sankey couched it with concerns that the CFP selection committee prioritized losses last year, when the SEC had only three teams make the 12-team field.
“One of the issues in the room for our athletics directors is what seemed to matter most, is the number to the right, the number of losses. And how do we understand what that means for our schedule moving forward?” Sankey said during his appearance on the Paul Finebaum Show. “I’m one who said I really think we ought to be trying to move towards a nine-game conference schedule. I think that can be positive for a lot of reasons. You watch the interest around conference games.
“But not if that causes us to lose opportunities.”
Sankey added that he favors games of “high interest” in general and expressed disappointment at Nebraska recently canceling a series with Tennessee and Wake Forest canceling a future game with Ole Miss.
“I’d like to see us play more of these high-profile games. Both within the conference and outside the conference,” Sankey said. “But we have to recognize the CFP selection process is an important governing factor, or decision making factor, that contributes to the eventual outcomes of whether it’s non conference games or whether it’s the number of games played within conferences.”
Many within the conference believe the decision is tied to whether the SEC and Big Ten get guaranteed bids in a new CFP format. The conferences have discussed a 14-team format where each conference would get four guaranteed bids. The idea has received a lot of blowback.
Sankey confirmed that a discussion has taken place, calling them “allocations” rather than guaranteed bids. He discussed it Monday night again in the context of the CFP selection committee while also acknowledging criticism and indicating no decision should be made soon.
“Have our athletics directors joined in conversation about more allocations, whether you want to call that automatic bids? Sure,” Sankey said. “They’ve also talked about ideas of evaluating strength of schedule and trying to better understand how that analysis is made.
“I think we should probably slow down a little bit it jumping to conclusions, because there’s a lot to a lot of work to do in a short period of time, whether it be our scheduling decisions or discussions about the future College Football Playoff.”
The SEC schedule decision looms, with no format set for 2026 and beyond. The financial part of the decision involves ESPN and whether it pays SEC more for an extra conference game. The competitive part in the past was about teams wanting enough wins to become bowl-eligible. That caused schools such as Kentucky and Mississippi State to have reservations.
Now, the CFP selection criteria may loom even larger, with bigger schools such as Alabama and Georgia, which had favored going to nine games, voicing some trepidation.
Either way, a decision needs to be made in the coming months. Sankey alluded to events of a day earlier, when he flipped a coin to decide seeding in the SEC women’s basketball tournament.
“Maybe we’ll flip a coin over eight or nine,” Sankey said, smiling. “We’ve got some practice.”
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(Photo: Todd Kirkland / Getty Images)
