The LSU-Florida football game that was postponed from last Saturday in Gainesville, due to Hurricane Matthew, has been rescheduled for Nov. 19 at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge.
Greg Sankey, the Southeastern Conference commissioner, announced the rescheduling Thursday afternoon.
"It was important for us to come to a resolution," Sankey said in a released statement. "Each university had its own set of concerns throughout this process; however, existing SEC regulations did not provide an avenue to resolve conflicting issues in a more timely manner. As I have repeatedly said, this game needed to be played.
"In the end, I want to give credit to the University of Florida for making concessions to move this year's game to Baton Rouge."
The date became available when LSU and Florida exercised cancellation clauses for Nov. 19 home games against South Alabama and Presbyterian, respectively. Canceling the Presbyterian game and playing LSU in Baton Rouge will result in Florida going from seven home games this season to five - Massachusetts, Kentucky, North Texas, Missouri and South Carolina.
As part of the agreement, LSU will play in Gainesville next season and again in 2018.
Sankey also announced that the league's presidents and chancellors have established "the expectation for existing conference policy to be revised to better define the process for completing postponed or interrupted contests and to grant authority to the commissioner to determine the date and location of future games that may need to be rescheduled if the two involved institutions cannot mutually identify a date."
Thursday's release stated that had the Florida-LSU game not been rescheduled, the Gators and Tigers would have been ineligible to compete for this season's SEC title. It cited that the SEC commissioner's regulations now require each football team play all eight conference games in a season to be eligible to compete for a divisional title.
The commissioner's regulations, according to league director of communications Chuck Dunlap, would have overridden SEC bylaw 30.22.1.3, which states "the team in each division with the highest percentage of wins during regular-season conference competition will be declared division champion."
Though the game was rescheduled, it did not appear that Florida athletic director Jeremy Foley and LSU counterpart Joe Alleva were ready to let the tense situation go quietly.
"The conference office asked us to find a solution in working with LSU, yet LSU was never a true partner in our discussions," Foley said in a statement. "The SEC offered some other solutions, and LSU's administration made it clear that they were unwilling to consider other reasonable options."
Said Alleva in a statement: "As previously reported, it was our wish to have played the game last weekend, but all options that we put on the table were declined."
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.