Nick Saban gave Greg Sankey advice on being a grandparent

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey became a grandfather recently and is still waiting to meet his granddaughter for the first time.

Luckily for Sankey, his family and grandchild are only a short two hours away from Nashville, the location of 2023’s SEC Media Days.

“Cathy (Sankey’s wife) is driving up and we’re going to see our first granddaughter. Life comes at you fast,” Sankey told Paul Finebaum on Thursday. “One day I look in the mirror and there was a 28 or 35-year-old in there — and I had seen a picture of me holding my daughter, it was on a Facebook memory — and now she’s a mother.

“I’m really proud of them. We have two daughters. Both are married. This is our first grandchild and we’ll see how it affects my mental from time to time.”

At one point during media days, Sankey received some advice from an interesting source — Alabama head coach Nick Saban, grandfather to grandfather.

“I was walking with Nick [Saban],” Sankey said. “[Saban] said, ‘You’ve got to get in shape.’ I said, ‘Why?’ Well, he was with his nine-year-old granddaughter the other week and she was crawling on his shoulders, wanted to go for a ride, swim — let’s do this, let’s do that — I need to get back into my exercise routine.”

On top of the great news of his daughter delivering his first grandchild, last week the SEC announced that Sankey has agreed to a contract extension that’ll keep him in charge of the SEC through at least 2028.

As SEC Commissioner, Sankey has elevated himself to the point that he has become the most important person in all of collegiate athletics. That reputation was a major contributor in making conference expansion a priority over the last couple of years — and it has paid off with the additions of the Texas Longhorns and Oklahoma Sooners to the SEC.

“When I [at SEC Media Days] here in Atlanta last year, I was clear that we’re focused on our growth to 16,” Sankey said earlier this week. “… People can criticize me to say, wow, you really sprung it on people in 2021, which we did, and maybe there’s no clean and perfect way to deal with conference membership.”

Sankey also didn’t rule out the possibility of bringing in more teams after Texas and OU settle into their new conference, though it’s not on the SEC’s list of priorities given the 16 teams that it will govern after next year’s conference realignment.