Louisville's Jeff Brohm '100 Percent' In Favor of Nine-Game ACC Conference Schedule

More change could soon be on the horizon as it pertains to the structure of league games within the Atlantic Coast Conference.

After decades of debate, the SEC announced last Thursday that they would be implementing a nine-game conference schedule starting with the 2026 season. Just hours before the announcement, Yahoo! Sports' Ross Dellenger reported that the ACC "would likely follow suit" if the SEC did wind up pulling the trigger on a nine-game schedule. As it currently stands, the ACC is the only power conference left to make the switch.

While a handful of coaches within the SEC were not in favor of adding the extra conference game, over in the ACC, Louisville head coach Jeff Brohm is very much on board with this potential change.

"I'm 100 percent in favor of moving to nine games, and have been for a while," he said. "I think college football, in my opinion, should, for the good of the game, try to go to where you're scheduling the best opponents every week. However many games that is, of course, I've for as many as we possibly can."

Brohm is of the mindset for both internal and external reasons. For starters, adding another game against a power conference team will only help make that team better in the long run, as opposed to just beating up a Group of Five or FCS team. Additionally, dropping the lesser team for another conference game bulks up your strength of schedule, which has been a major talking point in recent weeks and months. On top of that, it creates a more entertaining product for the fans in attendance or watching on TV.

It's for these reasons that Brohm believes the ACC needs to make this adjustment sooner rather than later.

"I think it's important to play good competition every week for a lot of reasons," Brohm said. "I think it's better for your team, and I think it's more enjoyable for the fans, and I think it's better for the game of football. I hope that that continues to happen. The strength of schedule is something people look at, and we hope to do the same thing, but I'm sure probably we'll get the nine games here soon, as far as in the conference."

However, from a mathematical standpoint, the ACC moving to nine games is going to be difficult. This stems from the fact that the league has an uneven amount of teams with 17. While leaders within the ACC have long been having the discussion on how to make nine games work, there's no clear solution.

"If you go to nine, if the SEC ends up going to nine and maybe we end up going to nine, I think there's a few challenges," ACC commissioner Jim Phillips said at ACC Media Days. "Those rivalry games that we really enjoy, I think that the fans really enjoy, I think some of those go away, and it now focuses on everybody's conference schedule than it is a mix of conference schedule and non-conference.

"Also, I think it's a challenge for us with an odd number of schools at 17 and how you exactly work that out. That in itself, there's some difficulty there. I continue to talk to Greg, and I talk to Tony and Brett all the time. We have frequent conversations. I mean, no one's kind of moving in a vacuum on this. We're exchanging thoughts there. We'll see."

If the ACC does make the move to a nine-game conference schedule, something to consider is future home-and-homes against non-conference opponents. As part of their move to nine games, in order to preserve intra-conference rivalries and further boost SOS, the SEC implemented a new rule that members must play "at least one additional high quality non-conference" opponent from the ACC, Big Ten or Big 12 (or Notre Dame).

Over the next five years, Louisville has three SEC teams on their future schedules: A home-and-home with Georgia, a home-and-home with Texas A&M, and of course the Governor's Cup vs. Kentucky. Notre Dame also has a quarter of games slated against the Cardinals in the 2030's.

Regardless of the scheduling changes from either conference, Brohm wants to keep all three opponents on the schedule.

"Out of conference, we've got a good slate in the near future that I would hope that we could continue to play all those games that are on our schedule: Kentucky, Georgia, Texas A&M and all those," he said.