Sam Pittman on SEC scheduling: 'It's not broke at eight'

The SEC coaches and administrators had plenty to talk about during the spring meetings in Destin. That still includes the future of scheduling in the conference and how many conference games every team is going to play.

While at the SEC spring meetings, Arkansas head coach Sam Pittman explained that he doesn’t have a particularly strong feeling on the topic of scheduling length. However, he also admitted that he doesn’t see a need to change right now.

“I don’t have a feeling either way,” Sam Pittman said. “I just know that it’s not broke at eight. We’re doing well. We’re winning national championships. To me, it doesn’t make a lot of sense — just to me, personally — to go to nine when eight’s working for us.”

For many, the concern with eight conference games is that not everyone in the SEC plays everyone with enough frequency. That’s only going to grow as a concern as the conference expands. On top of that desire to play everyone with some regularity, there are also important rivalries to maintain. All of that makes it difficult to schedule in the SEC. So, a ninth game would make that easier to manage.

On top of all of that, SEC conference games are more valuable in most cases than non-conference games.

At the same time, to Sam Pittman’s argument, if the end goal of the SEC is to send teams to the College Football Playoff and win championships, the conference has clearly been able to figure that out with an eight-game conference schedule.

This was a topic last offseason in the SEC as well, with the conference sticking at eight games for the time being. At the time, commissioner Greg Sankey argued that the schedule simply had a lot of issues. Despite that being an issue last year, earlier in 2024 Texas AD Chris Del Conte confirmed that the SEC is working on a nine-game schedule.

“We have eight games scheduled right now,” Del Conte said in February. “We’re working on going to a nine-game schedule, but we have a ways to go with that. I would say this year we have an eight-game schedule. The following year, we have another eight-game schedule. Then we’ll look at going into a nine-game conference schedule.”

For now, nothing is set in stone and changes in the sports world could change the future of scheduling. So, only time will tell as to what the future of the conference schedule in the SEC looks like.