During these troubling times, it’s important for everyone to remain optimistic. It’s even more important for our leaders to exude a sense of hope in us all.

Thankfully for the Southeastern Conference, in addition to his stellar leadership in recent days, Greg Sankey remains as optimistic as ever when it comes to the 2020 football season.

Many SEC fans are currently in a state of despair when it comes to the possibility that there could be no season for us all to enjoy but when it comes to the 2020 season, Sankey says the SEC is currently preparing as if it will be business as usual come the fall.

“Our focus is on preparing for the 2020-2021 fall seasons as currently scheduled. So there’s a period on the end of that sentence,” Sankey said on Wednesday during the SEC teleconference following the cancelation of all spring sports. “We will obviously think about everything going forward because we are being guided by public health information and decision making but our hope is we can return to our normal, organized activities, our normal experiences and being a part of that celebration around soccer, volleyball, cross country and football in the fall – but we’ll have to see.”

Sankey was then asked a follow-up question regarding how optimistic he is that we will have a complete football season come the fall.

“That’s my focus. I’m a half-full perspective person so I have optimism,” Sankey answered. “We have taken measures, as have our colleague conferences at this time. I think that if I read those health leaders, they say we are going to have a period of time, see what happens with the growth of these cases and we will make decisions down the road.

“For me, my responsibility is to support the public health decision making but also to be prepared to do our work that’s assigned to us. We have categorized things for everyone — one is to be focused on the work we have. The second is to make sure we are prepared for next year as planned and third is to engage in big picture thinking, in which contingency planning but also strategic planning.”

While it’s fine to question what will come next, it’s nice to know the leadership at the SEC is doing everything they can to ensure the football season is played as scheduled in the coming months. We all know by now that we’ll need something to help us move on from this challenging time in history and for many Southerns, nothing will do that better than SEC football.