I did some research and called DirecTV. It wasn't their fault. Here is what happened: The SEC Network had the games lined up on Saturday where there was no overlap because of the Thursday and Sunday games. So, the SEC Network TOLD everyone that they didn't need to have the Alternate channel setup until this weekend. Satellite space is in high demand and so they don't allocate channels until they have to and neither DirecTV or Dish had the alternate setup. It appears this caused a huge kerfuffle in the SEC Network home office because they knew they weren't supposed to kick things over to the alternate channel but didn't actually tell the people running the games that.
Soooo, DirecTV had planned to have the Alternate channel all along, the SECN 17'ed up. This was confirmed on the DBSTalk forums so it's legit.