SWAC to return to 9-game league schedule in '10

• By PERRYN KEYS
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Jun 20, 2009

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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.”

In other action: 

-- The SWAC changed its procedure for breaking three-way ties, adding margin of victory as a factor.

Last year, margin of victory was not part of the equation — and if Southern had defeated Grambling in the Bayou Classic, the SWAC would have needed to flip a coin to determine the Western Division winner between SU, Grambling and Prairie View.

“We understand that with margin of victory, there is a possibility of teams running of the score,” Sharp said. “But this way, we still leave it in the hands of our student-athletes and our coaches to decide who wins. ... I think the coaches are saying, ‘If I can’t stop a team, they’re supposed to score on me.’”

-- Also, in 2010-11, the SWAC men’s and women’s basketball schedules will begin in December.