Greg Sankey explains SEC's decision to eliminate divisions

The SEC is the latest conference to do away with divisions in the near future. For commissioner Greg Sankey, he said much of it eventually came about once the league better-defined terms like “fair” and “balanced” within the context of their slates.

At SEC Media Days, Sankey said the issue came up originally around 2018 or 2019. The issue, and reason why nothing came of it at the time, was the inability to make things “competitively equitable”.

“That discussion in football goes back to 2018, 2019,” Sankey said. “So the discussion of is our current divisional approach in football the most competitively equitable? So the words “fair and balanced” came up a lot. You had to define what do you mean by fair and what do you mean by balanced in the schedule.”

Then, around the time of the pandemic, Sankey says they revisited the matter. Once they announced expansion a year later, they came up with the model that we know will come about in 2024 that best evens things out for all the teams in the league.

“We were here in March of ’20. You’ll remember that activity with a report to our presidents and chancellor as a 14-team league. Here’s the possibilities of how we might adjust. We stopped everything, including that discussion, in 2020,” Sankey said. “Fast forward a year, the expansion was announced. When we began discussing a 16-team football schedule in August of ’21? The first set of conversations were, again, taking the words “fair” and the word “balance” and defining them.”

“Balance was rotating teams through with greater frequency. So I think plenty of people have written about a team may not see a team certainly for six years or may not go someplace for 12 years if they’re in another division. So that was balanced. Fair was narrowing the competitive equity band, which is what we achieved, even with our eight-game schedule we announced a few weeks ago in June.”

From here, Sankey knows there’s a lot of excitement around the future of what the model will be moving forward. In the end, though, keeping those adjectives at the center of it all is the focus of the SEC from ’24 and on.

“The eight- or nine-game schedule debate, the number of games played within the conference? (It) will start to be part of our discussion as we move forward and look to 2025,” said Sankey. “But the effort to try to be both fair and then balanced within that scheduling approach was the motivation around eliminating divisions.”