Sam Pittman makes strong statement against potential of 9-game SEC schedule

The SEC has been weighing the pros and cons of expanding the conference schedule to nine games. Now, Arkansas Razorbacks head coach Sam Pittman shared his thoughts on the subject.

While speaking to reporters, Pittman made it clear that he’s against expanding the schedule for a few different reasons. He, importantly, doesn’t see a need to expand the current schedule while also emphasizing that it could end scheduling valuable and exciting non-conference matchups.

“I think the way that they did it before was that we could get a home-and-home with everybody in the league if you were here for four years,” Sam Pittman said. “If you were a four-year student and you played with us for four years, you’d get a home and home with everybody in the league at an eight-game schedule. To go nine, in my opinion, would be ridiculous.”

This comes after it was reported in July that momentum was building for a nine-game SEC schedule. However, at the time, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey shared that he wanted to see how the new 12-team College Football Playoff format worked before making any final decisions.

“You see what’s going [on] now. You’ve got two-loss teams trying to get in the Playoff. It wasn’t broke before. I mean, we were playing for the national championship all except for last year forever in our league. To me, eight is plenty and have to figure out exactly how to get to the championship game but we don’t need nine. I mean, everybody would be limping into the postseason play,” Pittman said.

“The other thing too is I think there’s something about college football where you go out and you play somebody that you never played before as in we’re gonna play Notre Dame next year. There’s no way in the world you’re gonna schedule nine SEC games and Notre Dame — we might but we shouldn’t. By the time you’re playing the Playoff is what you’re doing. So, I think most guys in the league would say nine would be too many.”

Since the SEC expanded to 16 schools, expanding the schedule has been a major topic of debate. That would, after all, make it easier to play every school in the conference with some frequency while giving more opportunities to protect historic rivalries. It would also add more marquee games for fans than non-conference games typically provide.

Among the power conferences, the Big Ten and the Big 12 both already play nine-game conference schedules. Meanwhile, the ACC and the SEC have eight-game conference schedules.

It had also been suggested that there would be value added for Arkansas to play new SEC member Texas annually. However, Sam Pittman also shot that down, given how many rivalries the Razorbacks already have.

“Our rivalry, we’ve got Missouri, you know,” Pittman said. “We got a boot for LSU. We’ve got a freaking something else for [Texas] A&M. We got plenty of rivalries. To sit here and say I want to play Texas every year, well who are you going to trade them for? LSU? You understand what I’m saying.”

The Razorbacks and Longhorns will play for the first time as SEC members this upcoming weekend when Arkansas is set to host Texas.