I never did mind what was deemed “Cupcake Weekend” for the SEC. Why does it matter when on your schedule that you play a team that is likely just there to pick up a paycheck, not compete for a win? It happens all over college football during the first three weeks of the season in other conferences.
So why did it matter to fans of the Big Ten, ACC and others when an SEC team played the cupcake on their yearly schedule? We shall never know, because after this season, that weekend is over.
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey announced the end of conference teams playing non-conference (and often, non-FBS) teams in the week leading up to the regular season finale. Out of everything going on in college football, and with everything that is wrong with it, that weekend full of UT-Chattanoogas and Mercers is near the bottom of the list. There are so many issues that need solving in the sport that this mere scheduling “flaw” should not have been an important topic of conversation at the SEC spring meetings this week.
Getting rid of Cupcake Weekend solved absolutely nothing
But here we are, and the week of getting players rested and ready for rivalry games is over. And, for some teams (and, unfortunately, Auburn has been one of those in the last five years), having a cupcake game to end the home schedule every two years was a great way to guarantee that you send your seniors and other departing players out on a high note in their home finale.
Sure, NIL continues to be a problem, and the transfer portal has turned things into a crapshoot when it comes to keeping together a roster on a year-by-year basis, and tampering has become more rampant as the NCAA continues to lose what little control of the sport that they had in the first place, but let’s focus on the fact that Auburn plays Samford in Week 2 instead of Week 13, as we all know Walter Camp declared as law when coming up rules for the sport.
Instead of keeping games in college stadiums as they are meant to be instead of soulless NFL stadiums, let's worry about how many points Georgia puts on Citadel before facing rival Georgia Tech.
If I can borrow a line from Joey Tribbiani, the issue of when you play a cupcake on your schedule is moo, as in a cow’s opinion. It doesn’t matter. But for the love of John Heisman, at least we got that fixed. Sankey and every other commissioner should be celebrating this victory with a Joey special: two pizzas.
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