SEC formally eliminates 'cupcake weekend' beginning in 2027

DESTIN, Fla. (AP) — The Southeastern Conference is eliminating “cupcake weekend.”

The league’s athletic directors voted at their annual spring meetings for everyone to play conference games on the second-to-last week of the regular season beginning in 2027.

It means no more Football Championship Subdivision or lower-tier Football Bowl Subdivision opponents before those rivalry games that typically take place during the final week of the season.

“That’s the end of cupcake weekend,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said. “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 non-conference 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 the ’26 season.”

Only four SEC teams – Alabama, Auburn, Mississippi and Mississippi State – have such games set for this season.

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. Yurachek pointed out that his team will essentially lose a full day between a 9:15 p.m. kickoff at Utah on Sept. 12 and an 11 a.m. kick 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 post on X, formerly Twitter. “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.”

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