Kirby Smart on college football’s future
Kirby Smart urges leaders to prioritize the game’s future over personal or conference agendas in playoff talks.
MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. – SEC officials arrived here this week with a goal of zeroing in on a conference schedule format for football for 2026 and beyond. And they probably will leave here Thursday without approving a format.
Two factors continue to hold up a vote on a schedule format.
One: There’s not consensus behind a model. Some stakeholders want to stay at eight games. Others want to move to nine. Generally, the SEC’s coaches sound mostly interested in staying at eight, while the conference’s athletic directors seem to leave the door cracked a little wider toward nine. But, even within those groups, there’s not consensus.
LSU’s Brian Kelly said he’d favor nine conference games. Arkansas’ Sam Pittman prefers eight.
Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte would like nine, but he acknowledged he doesn’t speak for the room.
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey favors nine, but he doesn’t get a vote, only a voice.
Back and forth the Ping-Pong ball goes.
The other element delaying the vote? The SEC is not up against a hard deadline. The conference’s 2025 schedule is set, and it retains some runway to drag out the decision for 2026. Amid the pandemic in 2020, the SEC scrapped its schedule and devised a new one less than six weeks before kickoff.
Don’t expect the SEC to repeat that 2020 timeline, but also don’t expect that all these diverging opinions will coalesce behind a solution within the conference’s spring meetings that end here Thursday.
Also affecting the decision: The College Football Playoff format for 2026 and beyond remains undecided, and multiple SEC coaches and administrators expressed reluctance to decide the conference schedule model until more…
Source link : https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/sec/2025/05/28/sec-football-schedule-2026-greg-sankey/83661716007/
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Publish date : 2025-05-29 00:44:00
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