SEC commissioner Greg Sankey talked to the media on Monday longer than maybe former Seahawks RB Marshawn Lynch talked to the media in his whole career.
Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but Sankey talked for an hour at the annual Associated Press Sports Editors’ southeast regional conference.
Of course, the ban on satellite camps was the main focus of the session. Here’s what he had to say about that.
“We were clear in our perspective, but we had two votes out of 15 in a weighted voting system among the Bowl Subdivision,” Sankey said. “So it’s not as if we simply controlled the outcome. The ACC and the SEC have been in lockstep in this over time, again, dating back years related to how we are going to conduct football recruiting. So, obviously, it takes more than the Southeastern Conference to accomplish this change.”
According to Sankey, the SEC has had its collective eye on this issue since 2011, and before Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh gave it so much attention this offseason.
Due to what he called “recruiting tour events,” Sankey mentioned that football programs were opening more and more positions for recruiting, and he holds the same position as Dan Mullen that allowing the satellite camps would open a pandora’s box to many more concerns.
Many other notable questions were posed to Sankey.
Exclusion of FCS games
“It’s a conversation piece, but we have not eliminated those. Our schedule is set up across the season, rather than toward the end, so each conference is allowed to have its scheduling philosophy. Sometimes you have to fit pieces in where there are openings to play games. There’s relatively speaking a limited number of those FCS games. Some of those are quite challenging opponents, relatively speaking. But we have not had a hard and fast discussion about eliminating those opportunities.”
How closely do you follow the Title IX lawsuit against the University of Tennessee? What conversations are happening at the conference level about how universities handle sexual assault accusations against student-athletes?
“We have a transfer policy that we references earlier. That was a conversation that has occurred in this league. We have a working group looking at student-athlete conduct, so it is a conversation that is occurring.
“It is not appropriate for me to comment on lawsuit that in obviously involving a university. There’s a legal process for that and appropriately so. Separate from those conversations, we are attentive to federal law in providing resources and information. Our campuses do very well at having resources and … information and education on those issues on a regular basis.”
Are there discussions for expanding the sales of alcohol in premium seating areas throughout SEC stadiums?
“We’ve had that ability for a long, long period of time. That piece has been a conversation. No conversation about expanding it throughout the stadium at this point. We’ve got a longstanding policy that there can be access in private or overseen areas, and that piece is a point of conversation, but not necessarily the broader availability.
“We want to be careful about crowd management, game control, those issues. It obviously is a topic because you seem to see almost weekly across the country other programs that have made alcohol more widely available, which does prompt the question and provoke some level of conversation.”
Born and raised in Gainesville, Talal joined SDS in 2015 after spending 2 years in Bristol as an ESPN researcher. Previously, Talal worked at The Gainesville Sun.
