SECMD22: Sankey coy when addressing college football's future

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey speaks to the media on the first day of Media Days at the College Football Hall of Fame. (SEC Media Relations)

By GRAHAM DUNN

For once, the elephant in the room wasn’t wearing crimson or houndstooth.

This time, it was all about the evidence of what is happening with college athletics in general, specifically the world of football.

The 2022 SEC Media Days opened in Atlanta on Monday with the annual opening dialog from league commissioner Greg Sankey.

The scope of his message - stay the course with changes needed on a national level.

“As we look at the fall, we're going to have some difficult issues around membership,” Sankey said in his opening remarks. “That issue was not created by the five conferences labeled the autonomy conferences or FBS. It was assigned to the Transformation Committee by the Division I board.

“We're going to have to determine how to make effective decisions in Division I. There are incredible disparities around revenue, around expenses, around support and around expectations in this division. It makes it difficult to ensure the presence of shared values and common purpose around supporting athletics programs.

“I have a rule book that simply grows and grows and grows. We have a governance process that has key committees and councils populated by participants who rarely, if ever, speak and who are being asked to make important national policy decisions when they may not have that same authority on their day-to-day work context on campus.”

Sankey said he sat down in his New York vacation getaway on June 30 only to have his trip waylaid by the announcement that Southern Cal and UCLA was planning to join the Big 10 in a couple of years. He stated he had heard grumblings but the timing may have caught him off guard.

But he warned - get ready. There’s more coming, just not as quickly as some might think.

“As I look and try to project what takes place and guess, that type of movement was somewhere in my thinking but not at that moment. But, we’re comfortable at 16 (in the SEC),” he said. “There's no sense of urgency, no sense of panic. We're not just shooting for a number of affiliations that make us better. Could they be out there? I would never say they're not. I would never say that we will.

“We're going to be evaluating the landscape. I'm not going to speculate. I actually am watching a lot of this activity operating around us, more so than impacting us directly.”

Coaches will be asked all week regarding their thoughts on NIL and what they have to deal with in order to compete in what is the toughest conference in football.

“I did not mention name, image and likeness because that's been reserved by the Division I board of directors,” Sankey said. “On May 9th, you saw a statement from the board that I think was helpful. The question is, what's happened as a result? We need clarity from the NCAA national office on what's happening and what will happen under the NCAA Division I board of directors' directive.

“It's a difficult issue, subject to the onset of state laws that came into effect last July, and since that time some of those same states have pulled back from those laws because it's in the state's competitive interest to do so.”

Sankey said he hopes the playoff questions of how many and who qualifies (as in conference champions vs. at-large) could be settled soon. A brief meeting took place in June to set the stage. He said he was pleasantly surprised that some opinions had changed on the subject of who gets in.

“I was clear back in January when we walked away from the conversation that we as a conference weren't unanimous in our support,” he said. “I had as commissioner moved people forward to the point we were supportive as a league. If we're going to go back to square one, we're going to take a step back from the model introduced and rethink the approach, number of teams, whether there should be any guarantee for conference champions at all. Just earn your way in. There's something that's healthy competitively about that and creates expectations and support around programs.

“Where we go? We'll see. We've had one initial conversation in late June. I walked into that meeting not very optimistic about the ability to talk through issues. I walked out much more positive about the path forward than when I walked in.”