Georgia Athletic Director Josh Brooks makes his interests on the various hot topics in college athletics clear.

He will always do what is best for Georgia.

As the SEC holds its annual spring meetings this week in Destin, Fla., a number of hot-button topics will be discussed. From playoff format to potential House vs. NCAA ramifications — the settlement has still not been finalized as meetings begin — it is a time of great change in college athletics.

One of the topics that figures to come up this week is whether the SEC should move to a nine-game conference slate.

The SEC and ACC remain at eight conference games, while the Big Ten and Big 12 play nine conference games.

As the sport considers College Football Playoff changes starting with the 2026 season, there is the thought of moving toward a more unified format throughout the sport. In addition to expanding to as many as 16 teams, there has also been talk of adding automatic bids to the College Football field.

Much of the discussion to this point regarding an expanded SEC schedule has been hypothetical. The league won’t want to adjust its scheduling model until it better knows the parameters of the College Football Playoff.

When asked last week about Georgia’s specific thoughts on a nine-game conference slate, Brooks declined to provide a definitive answer on the matter.

But given what Georgia’s football team went through in 2024, it is fair to wonder if it should be staunchly in favor of a tougher SEC schedule.

With divisions dead and gone, Georgia played an SEC slate that saw it face four of the top 14 teams in the country, all as conference games. The Bulldogs were able to navigate that stretch and still win the SEC, but it came at a cost as injuries mounted.

Texas by comparison, played just one team in the regular season that ranked among the top 14 in the final College Football Playoff rankings. Tennessee and Alabama played two and Ole Miss also faced just one team in that grouping.

There was a schedule imbalance in the league last year and that happened to work against Georgia. Add in that the games against Texas, Alabama and Ole Miss came away from home and you can understand why Kirby Smart needled the league when Georgia won the SEC.

The ultimate goal for Georgia is to make the College Football Playoff. More SEC games creates more losses, making Georgia’s path to the playoff all the more difficult.

“We want to make sure that whatever decision we make puts us in the best position to get ourselves in the playoffs and as many SEC teams in the playoffs as well,” Brooks said. “So thankfully, we have a lot of faith in Commissioner (Greg) Sankey and the work he’s doing, and that’s going to drive a lot of that.”

Georgia also played two non-conference games against Power 4 foes in Clemson and Georgia Tech. The former made the College Football Playoff, while the latter took Georgia to eight overtimes.

The Bulldogs have future non-conference games lined up against Louisville, Florida State, Clemson and Ohio State, in addition to the annual contest with Georgia Tech.

Georgia has already shown some willingness to move off marquee non-conference games, as a series with UCLA that was set to be played in 2025 and 2026 was called off last summer.

The game with UCLA was replaced with a home game against Marshall, who Georgia plays on Aug. 30.

“We will look at it year-to-year and see how the schedule will evolve from there,” Brooks said. “I can’t definitively tell you which way it will go, but that’s a year-to-year looking at it, how it plays out. We’ll have to look at it and see where we’ll go over the next ten years of schedule.”

Of course, there are some potential positives when it comes to an expanded SEC schedule. Fans actively want more games against the likes of Texas, LSU, Oklahoma, etc. Those experiences, the home and road games, are what makes College Football the beautiful sport it can still be when administrators get out of the way.

There are also financial incentives that would come from an expanded SEC slate. According to a report from Seth Emerson and Andrew Marchand of The Athletic, the SEC could bring in an additional $50-80 million annually from ESPN if the league expands to nine conference games. ESPN holds the league’s television rights.

From a Georgia standpoint, a ninth conference game would also potentially bring another home game to a slate that loses a game to Florida every other year.

In terms of expected ticket revenue, an SEC home game brings in expected added revenue between $5.1 and $5.7 million according to projections for the upcoming fiscal year.

Add in that we’ve seen Georgia play a nine-game SEC schedule — the 2020 COVID season when Georgia played all nine of its regular season games against conference foes — and you can see why this becomes a difficult issue for every team in the league.

“A nine-game schedule gives you an opportunity for another SEC opponent, more quality matchups,” Brooks said. “We know that. We know that there’s more demand for that. We saw that in the COVID year. We played a SEC-only schedule, so you know that.”

This time a year ago, it would’ve made all the sense in the world for Georgia to be in favor of an expanded SEC slate. The Bulldogs would reap the financial benefits and had looked a clear-cut above the rest of the league in the last days of divisional play.

But a new schedule brought forth new challenges. Georgia navigated those about as well as any team could reasonably expect. But what if the game against UMass was taken off the schedule and replaced with say a game at Missouri or even a home game against Texas A&M?

Georgia is always going to want what is best for Georgia. That’s human, or in this case organizational, nature.

Whether a nine-game conference slate is the best for Georgia remains to be seen. But Brooks can confidently say he will be in lock-step with Smart in terms of navigating what those changes look like.

“I work very closely with that head coach to help them build a schedule that fits their needs,” Brooks said.