![\"SEC](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/GettyImages-2250384285.jpg\")
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SEC athletic directors voted Tuesday to have everyone play a conference game on the penultimate week of the regular season. Kevin C. Cox \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n
May 26, 2026 Updated 8:32 pm EDT<\/p>\n
MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. \u2014 The SEC is officially ending cupcake weekend. Or \u201cSoCon Saturday,\u201d as it was also derisively called.<\/p>\n
SEC athletic directors voted Tuesday to have everyone play a conference game on the penultimate week of the regular season. That will be effective for the 2027 season, ending a tradition that began two decades earlier.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that\u2019s the end of cupcake weekend in late November,\u201d commissioner Greg Sankey said, smiling. \u201cWe never got that one sponsored, though.\u201d<\/p>\n
SEC teams became known for scheduling weaker opponents the week before Thanksgiving, sometimes from the Southern Conference of the Football Championship Subdivision, thus the \u201cSoCon Saturday\u201d moniker. It wasn\u2019t always just that weekend, sometimes the previous weekend, but either way the programs saw it as a way to give their starters a late-season rest before rivalry games on Thanksgiving weekend.<\/p>\n
The practice became fodder for critics in other conferences, coupled with the SEC only playing an eight-game league schedule. The SEC adopted a nine-game schedule beginning this season, and SoCon weekend was already being phased out, thanks to the nine-game schedule and television\u2019s desire to spread out good games.<\/p>\n
But Tuesday\u2019s action formalizes it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s (because of) nine conference games and a recognition that you\u2019re populating more weekends,\u201d Sankey said. \u201cAnd so you really cannot have the odd numbers of open or nonconference dates later in the season. Because then that has a backward domino effect and really plays games early. And we ran into some of that in the 2026 schedule. So this allows more of the back-end scheduling and opens some things up so you don\u2019t have that late conflict with either open dates or nonconference games. I think that\u2019s the why.\u201d<\/p>\n
This year, there are four such games scheduled for Nov. 20 (Week 12): Chattanooga at Alabama, Samford at Auburn, Wofford at Ole Miss and Tennessee Tech at Mississippi State. There are five conference games. In the future, they will all be conference games.<\/p>\n
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May 27, 2026<\/p>\n
Connections: Sports Edition<\/p>\n
Spot the pattern. Connect the terms<\/p>\n
Find the hidden link between sports terms<\/p>\n
Play today’s puzzle<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SEC athletic directors voted Tuesday to have everyone play a conference game on the penultimate week of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":667166,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[1607,399,398,396,397,99],"class_list":["post-667165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-college-football","tag-football","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667165\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/667166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}