Dan Lanning criticizes SEC scheduling

Jason Jones

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Dan Lanning criticizes SEC scheduling image

Oregon Ducks coach Dan Lanning is not a fan of the SEC’s ‘cupcake week’. It took Lanning only about twenty words in his Saturday press conference to torch the SEC’s soft bye week in the thirteenth week of the season.

Considering just week 13 and just the SEC, this is a list of some of the games that were scheduled and played during a playoff stretch run. No. 3 Texas A&M vs Samford (48-0), No. 4 Georgia vs Charlotte (35-3), No. 10 Alabama vs Eastern Illinois (56-0), Auburn vs Mercer (62-17), South Carolina vs Coastal Carolina (51-7), and LSU vs Western Kentucky (13-10 which is the only outlier).

As college football moves into new territory (ie NIL, transfer portal, etc) certain aspects need to change. As storied programs are about to discover, budgets now carry more weight than a history of winning.

With players earning NIL revenue, they cannot be viewed as amateurs anymore. One of those changes, Lanning might agree with is how top programs schedule. In a college football playoff landscape, scheduling cupcake games just does not make sense.  

"This conference is a really good conference," Lanning told reporters. "It's competitive, right? We didn't play Chattanooga State today like some other places. We competed. That being said, it's tough playing nine conference games. It's tough playing in this league. We got to take advantage of playing a good team today and attacking that."

No. 14 Vanderbilt vs Kentucky, No. 17 Texas vs Arkansas, and No. 20 Tennessee vs Florida are perfectly fine as those are SEC matchups. However, there is no logical reason for the Aggies to ever play Samford or Auburn ever playing Mercer. Not in a college football playoff world.

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