[Tuck4Bama]

MUCH IS AT stake when 11th-ranked South Carolina meets eighth-ranked Kentucky on Thursday night at Williams-Brice Stadium. Standing in the SEC East division and national rankings are on the line.

Beneath all that is a chance for each school to take another step toward not needing to play college football games on Thursday nights. The winner presumably can inch closer to being a consistent winning program, and perennial winners in the SEC historically do not play Thursday night games on ESPN.

On only four occasions since ESPN began televising games on Thursday nights in the early 1990s have you seen SEC kingpins LSU, Tennessee, Georgia or Florida. Tennessee has appeared twice, LSU and Florida once each, and Georgia never has played for the ESPN cameras on a Thursday night.

The reason? The SEC powers are in position to tell ESPN they do not want to bother. Those schools raise all the money they need to support their programs without the help of ESPN. Those schools are not starving for national exposure, and they do not need a Thursday night game to help in recruiting.

Florida’s lone appearance on ESPN’s Thursday night programming was in 1992 when the Gators, under coach Steve Spurrier, lost at Mississippi State. Jeremy Foley, Florida’s athletics director, essentially said, “never again.” He believes it creates too much inconvenience for fans and disrupts the campus on a school night.

It is difficult to argue with those points. All you have to do is examine USC’s home game against Auburn a year ago to see why Thursday night games are all about money and exposure, with lesser concern for a school’s fans.

USC entered that game with a 3-1 record. Auburn was unbeaten and ranked No. 2 nationally. It was a big game for both teams and generated excitement for a national TV audience.


| Thursday night plight