Greg Sankey explains how SEC-Big Ten advisory group came about

As the legal battles mount for the NCAA, the SEC and Big Ten announced plans to form a joint advisory group to address “significant challenges” in the college athletics landscape. It marked a landmark partnership between two of the highest-profile conferences, which are both adding notable brands and beginning major new media rights deals.

The SEC’s decision to join forces with the Big Ten started in Houston, according to commissioner Greg Sankey. He pointed out the lack of progress being, particularly in a College Football Playoff management committee meeting – where, Sankey said, “you can make progress.”

It wasn’t just a one-time problem, though. He looked back over time and cited CFP expansion as an issue that stalled before eventually adopting a 12-team model. Sankey then attended some more meetings and decided it was time to take action, and he got in touch with Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti.

“I look back over really the last two and a half, three years, the effort to think about a playoff expansion that others asked for, that others sought and others ran to the microphone and in some ways demanded, the inability to make progress on decisions,” Sankey said Wednesday on The Paul Finebaum Show. “And then, I left Houston, hopped on a Southwest airplane that generates its own level of Twitter interest when I show that particular seating arrangement, and spent half a day in a Division I Council meeting … a couple other committees where we’re just not making the kind of progress on the really important issues. We talk about those – this draft is introduced, this direction might be changed.

“And when I left, I thought about well, if we just kind of keep going through these same types of environments to guide our decisions or rely on for our decisions, then we’re going to have the same pace of change, the same discourse, the same thinking that ideas are going to be generated from some other corner, and we need to make sure we take that responsibility. Now, understand, as a conference, we have a presidential working group looking at what the future could look like. I know others have had the same thing. When I left those meetings, that weekend, I called Tony and just said, ‘Tony, could we think about a little bit different approach?’ It was on his mind. “

Greg Sankey: People were asking when the SEC and Big Ten would look at the future

Since Tony Petitti took over as Big Ten commissioner, he made an effort to work with Greg Sankey. That goes back to some of his first days in charge when he and Sankey spoke in Birmingham, and they started talking about their agendas.

Petitti took it back to the conference, and the conversations began. Then, Sankey attended the NCAA convention in January for a council meeting and – considering the SEC and Big Ten’s prominence in college sports – received questions about when they’d start, effectively, calling the shots. The announcement of the advisory group came amid multiple legal challenges against the NCAA.

When Finebaum asked if it was “beyond” the SEC and Big Ten, Sankey said the two conference’s stature is likely a factor in that idea.

“I literally was walking out of that council meeting and I had three or four people who stopped me on the way out of the way back to my hotel who asked, ‘When are the SEC and Big Ten just going to tell us what it is you see in the future or what it is you want or what it is you expect?'” Sankey said. “I think that reflects back on your question about, this is beyond us because others are asking for that leadership. And we have great leaders across this country. And don’t for a moment think that when I read people who say that, ‘Well, Greg Sankey is going to have the answers,’ or, ‘He’s going to lead us through this,’ that keeps me up at night, that people would think that somehow I have a set of magical answers.

“There aren’t magical answers to what our historic realities that have worked really well in college sports over decades. And now, we’re being challenged in different ways. … A lot of people are contributing to the thinking. But again, bringing it back to the responsibility that these two highly prominent conferences share to try to help introduce some new perspective perhaps, some new ideas, some new thinking or maybe even more important, help cut through the bureaucratic tape that we face so often as we try to affect change in college athletics. I think all of those are part of that phrase in your question that this is bigger than than just us.”