The Big Ten has become the new king of college football after decades of dominance by the SEC. Kirby Smart however has Georgia still playing at an extremely high level that is capable of taking the Big Ten down and dragging the SEC back to the top of college football.
This will not be easy to accomplish though thanks to an inherent advantage the Big Ten has over the SEC. But as a conference the SEC needs to come up with a way to put their teams in a better position to compete with the powers from the Big Ten.
Unfortunately Greg Sankey did the exact opposite by announcing that every SEC team must play a conference game during the second to last game of the season beginning in 2027.
Greg Sankey announces that EVERY conference team will play an SEC game in the next-to-last contest of the season starting in 2027. pic.twitter.com/WYTzlsAgcU
— Anthony Dasher (@AnthonyDasher1) May 26, 2026
Greg Sankey just created a massive problem for Georgia and the SEC
Smart, along with other SEC coaches, have discussed this offseason that the talent gap between the Big Ten and SEC gives the Big Ten an advantage. The bottom teams in the SEC are believed to be much better than the bottom teams in the Big Ten which gives the top teams in the Big Ten a few games every year that they can essentially take off.
The best teams in the SEC don't get that luxury though because every week they are playing a team that is capable of beating them.
Smart believes that these extra "bye weeks" allow Big Ten teams to be more fresh when it comes time for the playoff compared to the SEC. This change from Sankey however will make that discrepancy even worse.
SEC teams historically scheduled bad non-conference opponents for their second to last game of the season. This was a nice way to give everyone the feeling of a week off which is something the Big Ten enjoys multiple times a year, but Sankey is taking that away from Georgia and the SEC and forcing them to only play difficult games at the end of the season.
So this advantage the Big Ten already has is only going to get bigger beginning in 2027.
SEC needs stability instead of constant changes to their schedules
The SEC needs some stability right now. Everything is changing in the college football world right now which makes competing at the highest level more difficult, so the last thing the SEC needed was more changes.
First it was NIL and the Transfer Portal. Then it was expanding the playoff to 12 teams. Now there are talks of more expansion to go along with the SEC playing nine conference games for the first time this season.
Those are all massive changes that are difficult to adjust to, but for some reason Sankey decided to throw another big change at everyone.
Thankfully for Georgia they will get used to playing an SEC team in the second to last week of the season this year. The Bulldogs travel to South Carolina this year for their 11th game of the season, so they will get some practice before other teams on how to handle only playing difficult games down the stretch.
But Sankey needs to know that all of these changes take a toll on teams, so hopefully he doesn't have anything else in mind for a very long time.
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