Greg Sankey continues to offer hope that the college football season can be played as scheduled.

The messaging from Sankey and the SEC office has remained consistent throughout the ongoing coronavirus outbreak in our country as panic regarding the possibility of a lost football season doesn’t appear to be something that’s leaked into the league headquarters.

Even Sankey is practicing his social distancing these days, as he recently participated in a video conference call from home with the SEC Network, which was posted to Facebook by the channel.

While the commissioner still cannot offer up many concrete details at this time, he was asked about the league’s ongoing discussions regarding the college football season and how the league is preparing for an offseason featuring condensed practice time and atypical weight training.

“From a staff standpoint, I just literally said today, what I want us to do is let’s get a timeline from Labor Day weekend backwards for each of our programs,” Sankey shared during the interview. “When would preseason practice begin? When [would] summer school [begin]? What kind of discretionary weeks, which are an NCAA rule term, are built in? And then start thinking about, with the football oversight committee NCAA Division 1 Council, how do we make accommodations; because you’re not getting the variances if you’re really interested in getting in-depth.

“Some programs nationally had a lot of spring practice, some had none. Nothing you can do about that, that’s just the teaching time we’ve lost. Our weight training, that was very different than it would be if everyone was on campus. How do we make sure people are physically prepared for football preseason practice?

“Hopefully, we’ll see an opportunity to get back and active in groups sooner rather than later, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be any time before mid-May, based on the national messaging right now.”

Again, Sankey continues to convey the league’s hope that football will be played in the fall and that every step is being taken to ensure that it can happen despite this unusual and unprecedented time in our history.