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SEC Sports
It will only be a matter of time before the Southeastern Conference makes a final decision on moving to a possible nine-game schedule.
The league currently plays in an eight-game schedule, with each member school playing four non-conference contests throughout the season. A nine-game schedule is possible in the future and Kentucky athletics director Mitch Barnhart expects that “decision is going to obviously come pretty quickly.”
Barnhart favors the current eight-game format, which allows the Wildcats to play as many as eight home games per year. The format also gives the Wildcats three home games against non-conference teams per season, combined with an alternating home-and-home contest against in-state foe Louisville.
“There’s no mystery on where I stand,” Barnhart said. “Eight’s better for Kentucky. There’s obviously financial components to it, there’s competitive components to it, there’s components to it as it relates to our ability to have seven home games or eight home games. We’ve been fortunate about every two-plus years, we’ve been able to have eight home games. … If we have nine conference games, the chances of doing something like that get a little bit harder for us.”
During SEC Media Days last month, commissioner Greg Sankey said the league is considering its options.
“We’re going to continue to evaluate whether increasing the number of conference football games is appropriate for us,” Sankey said last month. “As I’ve said repeatedly, understanding how the CFP will evaluate strength of schedule and even strength of record is critically important in our decision-making.”
Barnhart said the league’s athletic director meetings set for this month will likely provide a path moving forward.
“There’s probably a pretty good chance that’s on the docket and then some decision comes out of that,” he said.
Barnhart added that league expansion is an ongoing possibility and didn’t rule out any future additions.
“I think there’s always change, and we keep talking about that at a pretty high level in different areas,” he said. “Never say never to change. We’ll be ready to respond to it, but I think our focus for what we’re doing, we’ve got to make sure that, No. 1, from the Southeastern Conference perspective we’re paying attention to the environment and the landscape within our teams and then making sure that at Kentucky we’re ready to respond to what’s going on in the world of college athletics.”
A month into the House settlement that changed the landscape of college athletics, Barnhart said Kentucky is adjusting to the changes as it continually shifts.
“The change that has occurred has been massive,” he said. “We don’t even have a governance structure in place really, to be honest with you. You’re asking people to say, hey, this is absolutely a highway or the pathway we’re supposed to go down. I don’t think that’s a reality in anybody’s world. There’s going to be a clunkiness to it and a getting started piece to all of this, and hopefully the waters will smooth a little bit, but it is going to be a little bit clunky at the beginning.”
