When the 2025 college football season opens, Kansas State and Iowa State will face off in Ireland during Week 0, one of several international games in recent years. With Pittsburgh and Wisconsin set to play in Dublin in 2027, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey was asked whether his league could one day get in on the international fun.

Sankey, who said he had once met with the Lord Mayor of Dublin about potentially playing a game there, mostly threw cold water on the idea, at least for SEC teams facing each other.

“The economics of our stadiums are just very different from our colleague conferences that have been a part of that,” Sankey told reporters at SEC spring meetings in Florida. ”You know, the displacement of a home game in our communities and stadiums, it might be 85 to 100,000-plus, and relocating that, the logistical costs and timing, that’s a challenge. But the loss of that home gate, that’s really a challenge. We’ve had some conversations around maybe non-conference games, that might be an away game, but it’s never worked.”

The idea of an SEC team going international didn’t just come from the media. Brian Kelly said publicly in the past that he would like to take his LSU squad to Ireland, having gone in the past while coaching Notre Dame.

“We’ve done such a great job with the LSU brand throughout the country, I think the next step for us is international,” Kelly said at SEC Media Days in 2024. “I felt the travel there is so clean and easy. Ireland has been such a great destination for other football programs to go and play.”

Nick Saban never took Alabama outside of the country, but before his first season in charge, Kalen DeBoer was asked whether he would ever consider an international game for the Crimson Tide. DeBoer made it sound like he’d be interested, given the right circumstances.

No such trip is publicly in the works for UA.

“I think there’s a right time,” DeBoer said in August. “And when you’ve been at a program for a while and you want to continue to expand situations, things like that, I’ve looked into those different times, different places. I think it’d be tough, first year or two, to do something like that, but there’s just more and more things you want to put in front of those guys and experiences you want to give them, so I think that’s pretty cool.”

With the amount of home games a concern for SEC programs going forward, given the possibility of moving to a nine-game schedule that would see teams alternate between four and five SEC home games, perhaps an international game is a longshot. Besides, as Sankey pointed out, the regular SEC games are great, even if they never leave the U.S.

“I think I’ve said this before, the strength of this conference is in our communities, in our states, in the region, and we magnify that on a national and even international level,” Sankey said. “I don’t think that requires us playing internationally.”