SEC athletic directors vote to end ‘cupcake weekend’

SEC athletic directors voted Tuesday to have everyone play a conference game on the penultimate week of the regular season. Kevin C. Cox / Getty ImagesMay 26, 2026 7:50 pm EDT Updated MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — The SEC is officially ending cupcake weekend. Or SoCon Saturday, as it was also derisively called.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 before.“I think that’s the end of cupcake weekend in late November,” commissioner Greg Sankey said, smiling, and added: “We never got that one sponsored though.”SEC teams became known for scheduling weaker teams the week before Thanksgiving, sometimes from the Southern Conference, thus the SoCon weekend moniker. It wasn’t always just that weekend, sometimes the previous weekend, but either way the programs saw it as a way to give starters a late-season rest before rivalry games on Thanksgiving weekend.

The practice became fodder for critics in other conferences, along with the SEC only playing an eight-game 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’s desire to spread out good games.But Tuesday’s action formalizes it.“It’s (because of) nine conference games and a recognition that you’re populating more weekends,” Sankey said. “And so you really cannot have the odd numbers of open or non-conference 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’t have that late conflict with either open dates or non-conference games. I think that’s the why.”This year, there are four such games: UT-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.