Greg Sankey has attended the Masters golf tournament on several occasions, and he shares the opinion of most sports fans who believe it’s one of the most special events of the year.

The SEC Commissioner, though, is always looking to see how he could apply a “standard of excellence” to the SEC, and that includes bringing a notebook with him to events like the signature week for August National Golf Club. He shared those thoughts during a recent chat with ESPN’s Marty Smith on the Masters podcast, “Fore Please! Now Driving.”

“Being on the outside looking in, the amount of respect you have for an institution and entity, and the decision-making and leadership,” Sankey said. “Then I always walk around and carry a note pad and think about how they present their sales to fans. If you want to buy a pullover, a T-shirt, we’ve had that conversation in our office. How can we be more like this as a standard of excellence.”

Sankey said the SEC office has discussed how to talk about the SEC’s standard of excellence and he has not yet been able to define it.

“We’ll know it when we see it,” he said. “We need to meet this level of excellence. You see it throughout here. Those learning experiences are actually real for me.”

Sankey then compared the Masters with the margin of victory in a typical SEC football season.

“Here it’s the same, club decisions, understanding yardage and then placement,” Sankey said. “The golf swing is not a fine motor skill, it’s a total body movement. If you take time to study really the kinetics of that movement and the precision and the ability to repeat it, and then repeat it under pressure, it’s really remarkable what can be accomplished.”