111112 AUBURN GEORGIA

Auburn players take the field for warmups in front of a booing Georgia student section before the game at Sanford Stadium Saturday, November 12, 2011 in Athens, Ga. (The Birmingham News, Hal Yeager)

AUBURN, Alabama -- The Deep South's Oldest Rivalry is here to stay, and so is a new quirk in Auburn's SEC schedule.

Auburn will continue to play Alabama and Georgia at home and on the road in the same seasons as part of the SEC's recently-announced plans to keep an eight-game conference schedule, Auburn athletics director Jay Jacobs told AL.com Sunday.

Auburn will travel to both Georgia (Nov. 15) and Alabama (Nov. 29) for the first time in school history in 2014. The scheduling shakeup with Auburn's rivals is a result of a scheduling quirk when Missouri and Texas A&M joined the conference in 2012, and the SEC does not plan to correct it.

"I think it balances out," Jacobs said. "The way that it used to be, one at home and one away, was better for Auburn just to split those games up but we all had to make concessions in order to get what we wanted, so it's far more important to have the Georgia rivalry than lose that rivalry."

The SEC's presidents and chancellors decided Sunday to stick to an eight-game schedule with a 6-1-1 format. The decision preserves Auburn's annual rivalry game against Georgia from the SEC East.

"That was the No. 1 thing on my mind: protecting that rivalry," Jacobs said. "Certainly we're all going to get in a room together and do what's best for the SEC but my responsibility first is to take care of Auburn. With the history for that game and playing in that game and experiencing it, it was just something that I wasn't going to compromise on, nor was Gus (Malzahn) or Dr. (Jay) Gogue and the Auburn family. Georgia was the same way. We were really excited to get to continue to play the University of Georgia."

Georgia was forced to travel to Auburn in consecutive years (2012 and 2013) because of the scheduling quirk related to the SEC's expansion to 14 teams in 2012. The SEC has no plans to balance out the one-year hiccup.