Greg Sankey remembers former SEC commissioner Roy Kramer, impact on college football

On Thursday, former SEC commissioner Roy Kramer died. He was 96 years old. Kramer served as the SEC commissioner from 1990-2002. During an appearance on The Paul Finebaum Show on Friday, current SEC commissioner Greg Sankey remembered his predecessor.

“I have, on my phone, recordings from the spring of 2015. I had been named commissioner. Mike Slive was still the commissioner. We were in Jacksonville, Florida,” Sankey said. “… We’re out at a cookout, if you will, a low-country boil type event. And there were to be no speeches. Those had been the night before, talking about Mike and the transition, a little bit about me. All of the sudden, you hear a glass being rung with a spoon.

“Roy stood up and said, ‘Look, you can fire me, but you really can’t, so I’m going to say something.’ And he made a set of toasts to the athletics directors, who had come before and had built this league; the athletics directors who were there that night; to the SEC staff. I started recording because I figured out I should capture this. And, he made a toast to me, and he said to the people there that evening, ‘You need to support Greg because he’s going to be navigating uncharted waters.’ I mean, he nailed it. He just had this way of saying things that had such depth and meaning, and you may not have recognized in the moment.”

As the SEC commissioner since 2015, Sankey has indeed navigated unprecedented times. However, Sankey never would’ve led the SEC to its current heights without Kramer’s preceding achievements.

Kramer was responsible for adding Arkansas and South Carolina to the conference. Additionally, he was the first commissioner to usher create a conference championship, pitting the two top teams in the SEC against each other at the end of the season.

This development led to his most widespread contribution to college football: the BCS system. The system was in place from 1998-2013 and annually determined which teams would compete for the national title.

Greg Sankey walks on the path that Kramer paved, and he knows it. He won’t forget the impact Roy Kramer had on him anytime soon.

“Roy and I talked about the games over the weekend,” Sankey said. “We talked about coaching moves. We talked about what was going on. Ninety-six years old, had a little bit trouble operating the phone. I could tell something was different, but he still knew and still cared about what was happening.

“I’m sad. I’m sad we won’t have him here with us this weekend, which he often attended, at our invitation. But, I’m so privileged to have known a person that I viewed—when I first met him, 35 years ago—as a giant in college sports.”