SEC athletic directors have adopted a nine-game conference football schedule starting with the 2026-27 season, the league announced Thursday. The development comes as the CFP is set to implement new metrics in 2025 that place greater emphasis on strength of schedule, a change that could benefit SEC teams.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission named a senior military judge as enforcement director on Thursday, in what legal sources said was an unconventional pick for the top job policing Wall Street.

It appears cupcake games will soon be a thing of the past after SEC leadership made several changes for the 2026 season.

The SEC is moving to a nine-game conference schedule in 2026, ending a yearslong debate and potentially easing a path toward another College Football Playoff expansion.

For a long time, Beamer’s frustrations with the idea of the SEC moving from eight to nine conference games was that it really harmed the schools like South Carolina (Clemson), Florida (Florida State), Georgia (Georgia Tech) and Kentucky (Louisville) that already have a formidable Power 4 opponent built into their schedules.

There is now more uniformity across conferences in college football, and that could mean the SEC and Big Ten are one step closer to agreeing on the format of the College Football Playoff for the 2026 season.

Alabama football has scheduled two Power 4 non-conference every year through 2034, but that approach may change.

While he prefaced it by saying he didn’t know much in the way of American sports, Paul Martin, the co-founder of Box To Box Films and executive producer of the “SEC Football: Any Given Saturday” docuseries on Netflix, named a coach he’d love to document in a future season of the show: