New round of coronavirus has Sankey, SEC office scrambling but 'sticking to the plan'

By TIM GAYLE

The Southeastern Conference Championship Game is set for Dec. 19, commissioner Greg Sankey reiterated on Wednesday as part of a special conference teleconference. While the coronavirus pandemic has forced everyone to be flexible, Sankey said the plan has always been to stick to the plan.

“I’ve repeatedly said, really since last March, that the circumstances around the virus will guide our decisions,” Sankey said. “The reality is it is the virus that in some circumstances determines our direction.

“We have finish lines right now, so my focus is on Dec. 19 for an SEC Championship game. The (College Football Playoff) semifinals are on the first (of January), the championship on the 11th. I’m not going to hypothesize about change, but I’m not inattentive to the potential that change may need to occur at a number of different levels.

“I’m focused on the opportunity to crown an SEC champion on the 19th. And if we’re able to do so that wouldn’t predict an alteration.”

But, he acknowledged, the fact that four of the seven conference games are postponed this week only proves what officials knew before the season, that certain alterations would have to be made.

“I think it’s important to remember that so far to date in football season we’ve completed 40 of our 70 games,” Sankey said. “We recognized back in the summer that there would be the need to adjust. We provided opportunities for that. Those are not infinite opportunities, but we acknowledge the likelihood of adjustment. We’ve seen disruption in every conference and in leagues at the professional level. So the fact that we have disruption this week is not fully news. The significance of the numbers of contests affected fully is.”

Games involving Alabama-LSU, Auburn-Mississippi State, Georgia-Missouri and Tennessee-Texas A&M were postponed this week and both LSU and Missouri already have games scheduled on the only available date (Dec. 12) for makeups. As Sankey noted, the conference could move several other games to find the best fit available to play the postponed games.

Sankey pointed out the postponement of the Florida-LSU and Missouri-Vanderbilt games on Oct. 17 also led to schedule changes for Kentucky and Georgia during that period.

“It affected the involved teams, which were Florida and Vanderbilt, and it affected uninvolved teams, like Georgia and Kentucky,” Sankey said. “And that’s going to be the reality moving forward, and the ability to adjust games and modify the schedule. And we’ve said this to our membership repeatedly: It will affect more than just the involved teams.”

If the games can’t be made up, the non-COVID teams can add a playing date to their schedules to resolve the conference’s tie-breaking procedures. To be eligible for the conference championship game, teams must have played within one game of the average number of conference games played – today, that would be 5.7 (or six) out of six, meaning every team is eligible because all have played at least five games heading into this weekend.

The teams who lost a game because of COVID but were not the team affected by the coronavirus (i.e., Alabama, Auburn, Tennessee and Georgia this weekend) can add one game to their total, which means that even if Alabama, for example, completed the schedule without playing the LSU game and finished with nine games, they can count their schedule as a 10-game schedule for purposes of qualifying for the SEC Championship Game.

At that point, eligible teams resolve divisional ties with the standard formula, starting with head-to-head competition, followed by winning percentage. Should the SEC Championship Game not be played, for whatever reason, the conference would resort to the old method of placing the highest ranked team in either the College Football Playoff (if they’re ranked among the top four) or the Sugar Bowl.

As the league grapples with a new outbreak of coronavirus, Sankey said the challenge isn’t the virus but rather the quarantine imposed by contact tracing (i.e., the players who came in contact with the affected person). Those standards, he observed, are imposed by local health organizations.

“We don’t control those policies,” he said. “Over time, our test positivity rate is incredibly low among our student-athletes, something like .005 percent. Even this week the positive test numbers, even where they’ve risen, are relatively small. But the contact tracing has the potential to magnify even one positive test. 

“All of which serves as a reminder, moving forward, that adjustments have to continually be made. The basic issues around mask wearing, personal hygiene, social distancing, being fully attentive, that we are living with a novel coronavirus in our culture, in our society, around the globe, is real.

“It’s a difficult circumstance. No way to paint it otherwise, but we knew that challenges would emerge for college sports. They’d emerge in the Southeastern Conference, just as challenges are present across the entire society in our country.” 

Meanwhile, the challenges facing Sankey and the conference staff include control of the message. Rumors continue to spread about every facet of the college football season, including the possible cancelation of the remainder of the season.  

“There are plenty of scheduling suggestions on Twitter,” Sankey said. “I don't run the league based on Twitter. I’d like to share what's going on around me, but that’s not the way to run a conference. We’ll continue to move forward with our efforts to support healthy competition, leading us to a conference championship in football. That's been our goal while acknowledging the potential for adjustments that may be needed.

“We don’t override contact tracing policies at a local level. We are colleges and universities located in 11 different states with 11 different state policies. We have local policies. And so we have not been able to vary from what exists as 14-day quarantining for close contacts from the CDC. Perhaps that advice will change. I think that would be helpful. But those public health officials involved are the ones guiding that, not conference commissioners.”

As Alabama, Auburn, LSU and Missouri sit out their second consecutive week following an open date on Nov. 7, the College Football Playoff committee is preparing for the release of its first set of rankings on Nov. 24.

“One thing I’m not concerned about is the respect that exists for playing a Southeastern Conference football schedule,” Sankey said. “That's not going to change. We adopted a 10-game schedule knowing the rigor. We have teams that have played for six straight weeks dealt with that rigor, dealt with it successfully. I am absolutely certain that if we’re able to play 10 or nine (games) or our (division) champions play 11 or 10, that respect at the selection committee level will continue. 

“When we did have those conversations at the CFP level among colleagues, none of us could predict how many games would be played. And so there’s a bit of acknowledgment of variance. The rigor of our schedule is an important consideration. I think everyone respects the fact that we play an incredible level of football in the SEC, whether it’s in 2020 or any of the previous years, and I’m confident it will continue in the years ahead.”