The Southwestern Athletic Conference will revert to using a nine-game league schedule starting in the 2010 football season, one of several changes announced Friday.
The SWAC council of presidents voted to add the extra conference games through at least the 2013 season.
“Overall, some teams were finding it difficult to fill out the rest of the schedule,” SWAC Commissioner Duer Sharp said. “It was hard for some of our teams. Either people didn’t want to play them, or the payout wasn’t what they thought it would be.”
Since the SWAC expanded to 10 teams in 1999, the conference has flip-flopped between playing seven league games and nine league games.
That first year, in ’99, then-commissioner Rudy Washington decided in August that only a team’s four divisional games would count.
From 2000-04, seven games counted, but some SWAC teams opted to play each other in extra games that did not count in the conference standings.
Then, from 2005-07, all nine games counted. Last season, the SWAC switched back to seven.
“That’s the other advantage (of going to nine games),” Sharp said. “You can get a true champion.”
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