Tuesday morning from Radio Row at SEC Media Days 2023 in Nashville, Tennessee, Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey joined TexAgs Radio to discuss the current state of the conference, the week in Music City and more.
Key notes from Greg Sankey interview
- Deciding when Texas A&M and Texas will play is not “way” down the road but down the road. We are not committed to Thanksgiving because there are a set of realities where games fit for different reasons in our schedule, particularly in 2024. The neutral site games go in by contract, then you start to build around those, and we have limitations. It is not something we can commit to. I've been pretty clear on that one.
- We could work through playing what are really important rivalry games on an annual level on an eight-game basis, but you can't do that forever. To recreate labeling, the focus has been on if we were at eight games. One annual opponent and seven other opponents so you would play everybody, every other year. If you are at nine games, you have three annual opponents and six would rotate. After our decision for eight games, everyone looked at their eight games and thought, “Holy smokes.” Every one of those schedules is tough.
- I will identify a couple of concerns with NIL without ranking them. We have a national system of college athletic competition that fosters competition between conferences and national championships. We are seeing an erosion of those national standards. Not every state is the same. How do you conduct national competition if every state wants to wall itself off? You are left with state college championships. I was just in Houston at the Texas High School Coaches Association and expressed to them that they have great high school championships in Texas. That is wonderful, but that is not our culture.
- There is a lack of protection for the participants with NIL. A lack of consistency for the participants. If you are a recruit and you talk to adults that went through high-level recruiting, they say, "I can't imagine dealing with this when I was 17 years old.” There is no protection for people. There are a lot of promises made that are not fulfilled. Lastly, it's not sustainable.
- The next level is controlling the authority of the program. I had enough backroom conversations to ask what is going on and who has influence. Think big picture. There are a lot of good stories. I don’t mean to dwell on the problematic issues, but we better not kid ourselves to think all of this is working.
- It's tough to lose sight of the land. You have a system that has arguably worked well, not perfectly, for a number of decades. A lot of folks reminisce on the opportunities. We were slow to change. Look at history. External factors forced college athletics to change. That's the reality. How it will settle out is what I was attempting to address yesterday. Some will reject that and say that is just the commissioner talking. People assume this is the best we can do, and I don't assume that.
- My next concert is ZZ Top in upstate New York. It's two-thirds of ZZ top, so that's kind of a bummer. I was at Bruce Springsteen in Austin. I missed Blink-182 the other night. I was stuck in an NCAA meeting in Indianapolis, and I did want to go to another dinner. I went and bought one John Mellencamp ticket. I have two sets of tickets to go see U2 at The Sphere. I saw Journey at a private concert at the Final Four. Arnel Pineda is now the lead singer, and if you close your eyes, man, that is Steve Perry.
- People will write letters about favoritism. If people don’t cuss or threaten, I will generally write back. It doesn't mean I agree. There is one gentleman who writes me, and I can't read his handwriting.
- I have a note from Buzz Williams right now. We just named a new Associate Commissioner for men's basketball and called around to set up our coaches. Buzz and I had 10 minutes on basketball and 30 minutes on life.
- One of the most rewarding things for me is the volleyball national championship that Kentucky won at the end of the COVID-19 year. We had never won a women's volleyball national championship. I sense a renewed commitment to that sport. I look forward to seeing what happens in volleyball in the next five years.
- My first year in 2015, when Alabama played A&M, I walked into that stadium, and it was one of those times that I was like, "What in the world am I doing with this job?" It was packed. I did an interview at halftime of Texas and Alabama last year, and one of the reporters told me this is really incredible, and I said, "Eh, it's familiar." That on a week-to-week basis does not exist in other conferences. Perhaps the Big Ten, but not the intensity level.
