Big 12, SEC taking very different approaches to college football’s new Week 1
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One of the strangest scheduling anomalies in all of sports has already had its swan song in college football’s befuddling and charming Week 0, and conferences like the SEC and Big 12 are now figuring out what replaces it.
Week 0 has always been a strange little appendage to the season, open only to teams playing internationally, traveling to Hawaii, or occasionally granted a special NCAA waiver. This year’s version included eight games, nothing that qualified as a marquee matchup, but enough to give football-starved fans something to watch a week early.
That tradition ends after this season. The NCAA’s FBS Oversight Committee approved a calendar change that folds Week 0 into the regular schedule starting in 2027, meaning every FBS team begins play on the same weekend for the first time in years.
“Earlier this year, the FBS Calendar Subgroup presented recommendations to the committee to amend the regular season and the off-campus recruiting model,” the NCAA briefing read. “In response to those recommendations, a new FBS first-contest date has been adopted and will take effect in the 2027 season. The season will begin on the Thursday of what is now designated Week 0 and end on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.”
The switch gives college football an extra full week during the NFL preseason, which should help the sport gain more attention and higher ratings as it begins its campaign. Week 0 did provide some decent options for television windows, but the networks likely won’t complain about one more week of a full slate of games. It would also give teams an extra bye week to rest and spread out their schedules.
That much is settled. What isn’t settled is how each conference plans to actually use the week, and the SEC and Big 12 have landed on almost nothing in common, according to The Athletic.
The SEC is treating college football’s new Week 1 as a dumping ground for its weakest games, per The Athletic’s Scott Dochterman. The conference polled its schools earlier this year about which matchups they’d be willing to shove into the new opening week, and assistant commissioner Matt Evans, who oversees SEC football scheduling, said the answers skewed almost entirely toward Group of 6 and FCS opponents.
“If we have schools that would like to play conference games in new Week 1, we could try to figure that out,” Evans said, “but for right now, at least for ’27, it looks like it’ll be mostly Group of 6 and FCS opponents.”
The bulk of the new Week 1 matchups are being extracted from the second-to-last weekend of the regular season, a stretch the SEC has traditionally reserved for FCS opponents right before Rivalry Week. Evans said relocating those games was a deliberate part of the plan, explaining that the conference has tried to engineer an equitable path into rivalry week for every program, rather than allowing some teams to limp in off a glorified scrimmage against an overmatched opponent.
“What we were always trying to figure out with that second-to-last weekend was how do we have an equitable rotation there and how do we treat schools the same the week before the rivalry game?” Evans said. “How do you make sure that Alabama and Auburn are playing a conference game or a nonconference game right before they play each other? LSU-Arkansas, etc. So that was a little bit part of the calculation.”
Not every league is content to let the new week function as a repository for its leftovers. The Big 12 wants the inverse. Six of its schools have already secured opponents for the new week, and three more, Texas Tech and TCU among them, remain in active pursuit, targeting fellow power-conference programs rather than the overmatched, sacrificial opponents the SEC seems intent on hoarding.
“I think everything’s on the table,” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark told the New York Times-owned outlet. “We’re looking at lots of different options. We’re in that process of adjusting the calendars right now. So nothing definitive yet, but excited for the change and making the necessary changes in order to make sure that we get off on the right foot in that first week of the season.”
But getting off on the right foot means something different depending on which conference you ask, and we’ll find out soon enough what it means to the Big Ten and ACC too.
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