DESTIN, Fla. — The Southeastern Conference is eliminating “cupcake weekend” from its football schedule.
The league’s athletic directors voted at their annual spring meetings for everyone to play head-to-head conference games on the second-to-last week of the regular season beginning in 2027.
The SEC, Atlantic Coast Conference, Big 12 and Big Ten make up the Power Four, the highest level of NCAA Division I’s upper-tier Football Bowl Subdivision, but in addition to league games and crossover matchups with other power conferences, their teams mix in games against those from the less highly regarded Group of Six conferences in the FBS and D-I’s lower-tier Football Championship Subdivision.
The SEC’s move means no more matchups against those types of opponents the week before the traditional rivalry games that typically take place during Thanksgiving weekend to close out the regular season.
“That’s the end of cupcake weekend,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said this week at the league’s spring meetings. “We never got that one sponsored, though.”
SEC decision makers have discussed dumping those late-season payday matchups for months. The conference expanded to a nine-game league schedule beginning in 2026, prompting the need for more significant matchups in late November.
“It’s nine conference games and a recognition that you’re populating more weekends,” Sankey said. “And so you really cannot have odd numbers of open or nonconference dates later in the season, because then that has a backward domino effect in where you place games early. We ran into some of that in (making the schedule for) the ’26 season.”
Only four teams in Sankey’s conference have such games set for this season, all of them on Nov. 21 against opponents from the Southern Conference, an FCS league in the SEC’s geographic footprint: Alabama (versus the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga), Auburn (Samford), Mississippi State (Tennessee Tech) and Ole Miss (Wofford).
The league and its television partners also started releasing game times for the early part of the season and drew criticism from Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek. He pointed out the Razorbacks will essentially lose a full day between a 9:15 p.m. kickoff at Utah on Sept. 12 and an 11 a.m. start the following Saturday against Georgia.
“The assigned schedule will cost our student-athletes nearly a full day of rest and recovery that they would otherwise have available to them,” Yurachek wrote in a social media post. “This is not simply a competitive disadvantage — it is a genuine welfare issue for the young men who represent our program and contribute greatly to the bottom line of our television partners.”
He added that it “demonstrates a clear neglect for the well-being of college athletes.”