re: What does the SEC get out of playing a 9 game league schedule?

It's overall better for the sport and the fans.

Better games for TV and for the fans to attend.

However in strictly terms of the playoffs it's not productive.

The committee puts absolutely no value on SOS. They reward W’s and L’s. If a SEC team is a bubble playoff team and takes an L because of that extra game then it’s really going to suck if the team in question is a team you or I pull for. Some of these SEC schedules are absolute murder. I just hate to see SEC teams lose out for challenging themselves while everyone else is on easy street.

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The committee puts absolutely no value on SOS. They reward W’s and L’s. If a SEC team is a bubble playoff team and takes an L because of that extra game then it’s really going to suck if the team in question is a team you or I pull for. Some of these SEC schedules are absolute murder. I just hate to see SEC teams lose out for challenging themselves while everyone else is on easy street.

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bingo. Look at 2024. Ole Miss and South Carolina were left out at 9-3 while 11-2 SMU made it. SMU had zero wins over a ranked team at the time of the final CFP poll.

Last year, 10-2 Vandy and 9-3 Texas were left out (Texas having opened the season on the road at OSU)...while fricking James Madison gets an at-large bid with no a single quality win on their schedule.

Yet we thought it was a good idea to add one more conference game AND require one of our OOC games to be against a power conference team. Didn't get paid for it and out our conference at a competitive disadvantage to the rest of the power conferences

Yeah it almost like giving away a playoff spot or two. Sankey either didn’t think this all the way through or he has started working for the other power 4 leagues. I don’t mind playing another meaningful opponent as long as the other power conferences are being required to step up their scheduling.

Playing a 9th game is asking a lot when a team has to play 3,4,5 weeks in a row of ranked teams. Plus if a team gets key players hurt or seriously banged up then making the playoff really doesn’t matter because that team probably will not go very far. It’s just a mess. Then the title game representatives will have to play that game also. The SEC has a lot of good teams that has a lot of good players but no team can survive some of these long stretches of good teams every week unscathed. It’s just to hard to get players up emotionally week after week after week. It’s inevitable even the best teams will take losses. Then the SEC adds another conference game. Makes no sense.

More losses as a conference, lower rankings and more beat up.

The coach for Indiana was talking the other day about how people have criticized the Indiana schedule for being weak early. He said that they needed those games though because they had a lot of new players and it helped having those games to get guys ready. I about fell off the couch laughing when I heard him say that. Like most of the SEC wouldn’t have loved to play a bunch of cupcakes because they had new players too. We pretty much had to start playing ball immediately down South lol.

B1G is the ONLY conference NOT requiring their members play 10 P4 games.

Yet they claim they're better than everybody else.

But the B1G is the ONLY conference NOT doing 10 P4 schedules.

Yet whined when the SEC did 8.

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Sankey either didn’t think this all the way through

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He doesn't think anything through and is an embarrassment of a commissioner.
If other folks stopped seeing everything through the lens of "frick lane kiffin and lsu," it would be glaringly obvious how big of a pandering clusterfrick he is who buckles under pressure.

Hahaha!!! Something tells me you will be pissing and moaning the loudest should Texas lose a couple of games and just misses the playoff while some other team is taking the spot after playing a bunch of jv teams this season.

If the SEC had kept the number of league games played at 8 then there is absolutely nothing stopping schools from choosing to go out and schedule 4 of the hardest games they can schedule and then play an SEC schedule on top of it then nothing was stopping them from doing it. Nobody ever said that the 4 OOC games any SEC school plays had to be against the little sisters of the poor. Forcing a 9th conference game on everyone though means half the league will lose an extra game. If the schools that would be playoff bound any other year happens to lose that extra game then the SEC is giving away playoff slots to the other power 4 leagues that plays in leagues nowhere near as difficult as the SEC. So the SEC would be potentially giving away extra playoff slots for absolutely no reason because the playoff committee really doesn’t care about SOS. It’s more concerned about Wins and losses. Nobody wants to watch SEC teams beat up on cupcakes. Putting every team in the league through a meat grinder for no reason and possibly giving up several playoff spots every year when there is no value with the committee is totally dumb and stupid. It serves the interest of everyone else in college football and not the SEC and its member institutions.

Cupcake weekend was always terrible and boring. It did serve a purpose though. It allowed coaches to kind of manufacture a mini off week by getting a big lead early and then pulling the starters and resting them and allow young players to get some snaps and develop. The games were terrible and boring but at least they served a purpose. There is no purpose in making SEC schools possibly risk losing a playoff slot for absolutely no reason. The only purpose that does serve is to help ND and the other power conferences achieve more chances at the playoff for doing far less than SEC teams.