Greg Sankey has seen it all
Greg Sankey, SEC commissioner, takes the podium today at 11:30 a.m. Central for SEC Media Days.
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Sankey is expected to focus primarily on the 2023 football season but invariably he will be asked about 2024 newcomers, Texas and Oklahoma.
Expect a different tone from Sankey than what we heard in Arlington at Big 12 media days last week.
There are a couple of reasons for that difference in tone:
First, Sankey is not worried about the survival of his league and he doesn’t need to pull any rabbits out of his hat to keep it afloat.
Second, Sankey is cut from a different cloth than Brett Yormark.
Unlike Yormark who cut his teeth in entertainment, Sankey is a life-long college sports administrator. Sankey started out as an intramural athletics director, before becoming head of compliance at Northwestern State in Louisiana while also being the team’s golf coach.
From there, he became the commissioner of the Southland Conference in 1996 before Mike Slive, the then SEC commissioner and man generally thought responsible for elevating the SEC from merely a regional league to the juggernaut it is today, hired him six years later to become the associate commissioner of the SEC in 2002.
His career, to date, spans roughly three decades in college sports.
In other words, Sankey has seen it all.
He has a professional lifetime of understanding the nuances of college football, where it’s been and likely where it’s headed. He’s charted the course (or at least stayed the course set by Slive) and now the SEC is the behemoth of college sports and football in particular.
When Texas decided to join the SEC, the Horns not only wanted a bigger paycheck, they wanted greater stability with a keen, proven eye to the future.
Sankey and the SEC provide just that.
