The SEC Finally Adds a 9th Conference Game: About Damn Time

On Thursday, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey announced a ninth conference game will be added to SEC schedules starting in 2026.

Earlier this week, the College Football Playoff Committee announced that a team’s strength of schedule will take higher precedence when deciding who makes the playoff this season.

The big knock on the SEC in recent years has been that its eight-game in-conference schedule allows teams to add an FCS opponent late in the season to rest key contributors.

I tend to give a lot of grief to the SEC, as the league tends to be sanctimonious when discussing its strength. Fans always have to hear about football running through the SEC, and how it “means more” to those teams. However, I respect the decision to even the number of in-conference games with the Big Ten and Big 12.

It has never made sense that the SEC is supposedly so much better than everyone else when the bottom of its conference is just as weak as any other league’s cellar. Of course, Alabama and Georgia are consistently excellent. But I don’t want to hear about how top to bottom this is the best conference in football when you have Mississippi State getting annihilated at home by Toledo.

With the addition of NIL to the deep-pocketed schools of the Midwest and Pacific regions, the playing field has evened out. The SEC hasn’t had a team compete in the championship in the last two years, and the league struggled in bowl games last season, finishing 8-7 compared with the Big Ten’s 11-6 record.

The Big Ten dominated the SEC in head-to-head bowl matchups, going 5-1.

The landscape of college football is changing, and adding a conference game is the least the SEC can do to keep up with a shift in power that appears to be underway.

It has only been the last two years, but now that every team in college football can pay its players, talent is no longer concentrated in the South. This schedule change is a drastic measure for the SEC, which was reluctant to add a game because the league claimed its conference slate was more challenging than any other.

ESPN owns the broadcasting rights to the SEC, so it will continue to push its Southern bias to the rest of the country. But if the league doesn’t start proving it on the field, those pundits may not be able to push that agenda much longer.

Thankfully, college football is back this week, and we will get to see the best of the SEC and Big Ten going at it in Week 1.