Pretty soon, Georgia fans won’t have to dress so warmly for the Bulldogs’ annual game against rival Auburn.

Wednesday, Georgia president Jere Morehead confirmed that the school's series with Auburn is being flipped with that of Tennessee, starting in 2020.

The Bulldogs and Tigers traditionally play their long-standing rivalry in November, but will now apparently move to early October when the league announces its conference schedules for the 2020 football campaign.

“Essentially the conference has flipped Auburn and Tennessee,” Morehead confirmed to reporters following Wednesday’s board meeting of the UGA Athletic Association.

“They (the SEC) had their reasons for doing it. I suppose if I was looking the schedule, for me, is asking if our head football coach is happy with the schedule? Has our athletic director vetted it properly?” Morehead said. “All of those things have been done.

"We’re concerned about having our off weeks, making sure we preserve the off week before Florida. I believe they are at two critical junctures in the season, after Notre Dame and before the Georgia-Florida game. Those are the things that are really important. But I really defer to Coach Smart on those sorts of things.”

McGarity agreed that Smart is fine with the move.

“Absolutely,” McGarity said. “Again, if there are any issues our staff has with anything, they voice that, but Kirby would be very comfortable with the schedule that you see in 2020.”

McGarity was asked how the move would benefit the Bulldogs.

“Once the SEC releases the schedules, we will be able to answer those sorts of things. Right now, there’s so much speculation,” McGarity said. “I think one thing that’s really important is schools, when you’re presented with a draft of schedules, that’s the time you review it with your head coach, your football staff.”

According to McGarity, that’s already been done.

“Every school advocates for their own desire,” McGarity said. “So, you get in a room and if there are certain things you want to discuss with the conference—moving, changing—there are 14 athletic directors who do that. Everybody advocates for their own.”

McGarity would not say what Georgia’s requests entailed.

“The one thing we don’t do is talk about those conversations. We follow SEC protocol, talk about it in the room, developing schedules. So, there are certain things we advocate for that nobody else really knows about,” McGarity said. “That’s the whole purpose of going through that exercise, so that we don’t basically talk about in public what we talk about with the Commissioner (Greg Sankey) and (Associate Commissioner in charge of scheduling) Mark Womack in regards to scheduling. But there have been several times they've helped us with things that have been very important to our football program and coaches, whether it be Mark Richt or Kirby Smart.”

There's one thing the Tigers and Bulldogs did agree upon.

Before the league expanded in 2012 adding Texas A&M and Missouri, Georgia and Auburn would play in Athens in odd years, at Auburn in even.

But with expansion, the SEC instructed Georgia again to play the 2013 game in Jordan-Hare Stadium, which meant the Bulldogs must end odd seasons with road trips to both Auburn and Georgia Tech.

On the flip side, Auburn was forced to end even years with trips to both Georgia and Alabama.

“Yeah, absolutely. If we get a chance to fix that and return the favor we paid to them and return the favor they paid to us,” Smart said at last May’s SEC Spring Meetings in Destin. “Obviously, I wasn’t here. I think it can make it more consistent. It can balance things out. It would probably be helpful in the long run, but I’ve got a feeling there’s more to it than that. It always affects so many moving parts, but it would be nice if we could do that.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that will be the case. At least not now.

“I doubt that will ever happen. That was a one-time deal, unless the conference expands again, that may be another discussion, but we were in the same situation with seven other schools that had to make changes to the rotation,” McGarity said. That was done strictly due to the conference realignment, so I’d be surprised—unless certain things enter the picture like conference expansion, or we don’t have division play.”