The SEC Responds To Stallings’ Schedule Complaint

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Earlier this week, Vanderbilt head coach Kevin Stallings made it clear that he’s not happy that East Division rival Kentucky won’t have to play a Thursday-Sunday turnaround for the second-straight year.  (Like the one Vandy faces against Alabama and MSU tonight and Saturday.)

Yesterday, we gave you our take — that ESPN and CBS will always beg to get Kentucky (especially when at home at Rupp) lined up with their best timeslots.  UK is the SEC’s flagship program and best TV draw.  If that means more Tuesday games and less Thursday games for the Cats then ESPN is likely A-OK with it… even if it means someone else will move into those Thursday slots.

Jeff Lockridge of The Tennessean took Stallings’ complaint to the SEC office and got this reply from Craig Pinkerton, the league’s director of media relations:


“The SEC’s athletics directors have established a set of parameters to follow when building the men’s basketball schedule.  These parameters are in place to ensure that the schedule is as equitable as possible and enables the SEC to fulfill its contractual obligations with television.  We make our best effort to balance out the Thursday-Saturday tandem among all of the teams.  Last year we began moving some Thursday games to Tuesday to alleviate some of the issues with the quick turnaround.  Now we are playing two games Tuesday night with an ESPNU game that leads inot the ESPN Super Tuesday matchup.

We try to get every team at least one game and no more than four games on Thursday night.  The key issues is avoiding teams playing on the road for both parts of a Thursday-Saturday tandem.”


The bottom line?  Scheduling isn’t as easy as some think.  Especially with television thrown into the mix.  If Vandy was happy about its schedule, another school would be upset with its slate.  There’s no way to please everyone.  (Especially fans who will always view their schedule as the toughest and some other school’s as the easiest.)

Finally, we believe Stallings would have made a better point if he’d pointed out that Auburn, LSU and Kentucky all avoided the Thursday-Saturday turnaround.  Instead, he just mentioned UK.