SEC commissioner Greg Sankey emphasizes strength in 16-team conference

DALLAS, Texas (KBTX) - The 2024 edition of the Southeastern Conference Media Days kicked off with an introductory video that appeared just like any commercial you might see on the SEC Network.

Classic highlights of days gone by in the SEC flashed across the giant screens in the Omni Dallas Hotel, with shots of current football game days mixed within.

Then, there was a change form the norm. Bevo, the Texas Longhorn mascot, along with Oklahoma’s Sooner Schooner took the spotlight in the flick, a reminder of the new reality in the conference.

Even from the minutes before commissioner Greg Sankey took the stage, the SEC Media Days — hosted for the first time in Dallas — was a show of strength in the move to 16 teams. For the first time, Oklahoma and Texas were introduced to the 16-team pinwheel logo of the SEC and will have their turn in the spotlight on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively.

“Sixteen is our today and 16 is our tomorrow,” Sankey said.

The focus drew multiple questions on if 16 teams would truly be the future of the SEC, with another round of conference realignment seemingly always around the corner. Both Florida State and Clemson, members of the Atlantic Coast Conference, have filed lawsuits questioning the viability of their grant of rights agreement, or the legal document that gives the conference the rights to negotiate broadcast contracts for their games.

Sankey said he does monitor what is going on in those cases, but it is not a focus of his attention.

“We’re focused on our 16,” he said. “I’ve said before at Media Days, I’m not a recruiter. My job is to make sure we meet the standard of excellence that we have for ourselves on a daily basis. That attracts interest. It’s done that with theta universities that we have added this year. They’re not the only phone calls I’ve had, but I’m not involved in recruitment. Our presidents have been clear that I’m not going to entangle us into litigation around expansion.”

“We can certainly remain at 16 for a long, long time and be incredibly successful,” he continued.

The atmosphere around college athletics is thick with the uncertainty that has arisen from a settlement agreed upon in the House v. NCAA antitrust lawsuit. From that settlement, revenue sharing appears to be on the horizon, an issue on which Sankey briefly touched.

“There’s a lot of work still to be done,” he said. “There’s work to finalize the full terms of the settlement agreement. Beyond just terms is the hard work of implementing the outcome of that agreement. We are literally working to make what would normally be a decade’s worth of change in a matter of months. We’re not in a world either where we’re allowed to focus on just one issue or even one small set of issues at any particular time.”

That settlement spawns another group of questions. Scholarship caps will be a thing of the past in most major sports, per the terms of the settlement, but limits on how many players can be on a given roster is a matter still to be decided.

In another set of court cases, athletes have argued that they should be treated as employees of the universities they represent. Sankey offered a brief rebuttal to that argument, an echo of statements he’s made before.

“Whether you want to believe it or not, [athletes are] not looking to be employees and we’ve had pretty free-flowing conversations with them about what that may mean on what’s perceived as a positive side and maybe the more problematic side,” Sankey said.

Closer to home, there is still the matter of how many conference games SEC teams will play moving after the 2025 season. The conversation still revolves around remaining at eight games, which will be the case this season and in 2025, or moving to nine games to preserve historical rivalries as permanent opponents. As has been his response, Sankey punted saying they have time to evaluate after seeing the first season in a 12-team College Football Playoff.

Finally, as the SEC plays without divisions in football for the first time this season, a new system to break ties in standings needs to be approved, most notably to select the top two teams for the SEC title game. That system is still in the works and can be approved anytime between now and the start of the season, he said.

But, as the conversations continued with Sankey, the new-found strength of adding two member institutions always came back around.

The pivot was subtle, but an anecdote issued by Sankey about Texas A&M basketball forward Henry Coleman III turned an SEC Media Day question back to the matter at hand.

A member of the gathered media asked what were some of the issues athletes raised to him in his conversations around the conference. Great competition, he said, was their main focus.

A few years prior, Coleman, perennially a member of one of the SEC’s many athlete-led committees, asked the commissioner when Texas was going to join the conference.

“Is that because you don’t want to play your in-state rival or you do?” Sankey asked him.

“I want to play them as soon as I can,” Coleman responded.

With the start of SEC Media Days, that time is officially here.