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Greg Sankey has been a vocal advocate for the SEC moving to a 9-game conference schedule in the past, but made some interesting new comments on the issue on Monday.
Sankey acknowledged that it’s not an easy problem to solve as schools weigh a variety of factors.
“So when you look at our path forward, we look at the next few months as being really important to gather information, to talk about either opportunities or obstacles that might be in the way, to the extent we can answer that,” Sankey said during an appearance on the Paul Finebaum Show. “Like, what’s the priority of bowl qualification in the future? That’s still an important issue.
“Trying to understand how the selection committee for the CFP made decisions is really important. And one of the issues in the room for our athletic 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? I’m one who said ‘I really think we ought to be trying to move to a 9-game conference schedule.’ I think that can be positive for a lot of reasons … but not if that causes us to lose opportunities.”
Sankey is referring to the College Football Playoff selection process from this past fall. In that exercise, 3-loss Alabama was left out of the field in favor of an 11-2 SMU team during the 1st year of the 12-team CFP. Some have posited that expanding to 9 conference games could open the league up to more situations like that in the future.
Sankey is expecting to learn more information in the near future about how CFP decisions are made by the selection committee.
“I do think it’s important to understand how selection decisions are made,” Sankey added. “And we only have 1 year of that experience as we go to make another decision about our schedule format.”
Here’s a clip of Sankey’s full comments on the matter:
There have also been discussions about the College Football Playoff structure changing to include a certain number of auto-bids for the SEC (and other conferences). That change could come as early as 2026, when the SEC will potentially play a 9-game schedule for the first time.
Final decisions for the 2026 CFP and the SEC’s 2026 schedule are expected to be made in the coming months.
Spenser is a news editor for Saturday Down South and covers college football across all Saturday Football brands.
