Greg Sankey weighs in on how SEC will try to make up postponed basketball games
By Adam Spencer
Published:
The SEC played 69 of its scheduled 71 football games during the 2020 season. For men’s basketball, there have already been several games postponed that are in need of makeup dates.
So, what is the SEC’s plan to get as many games played as possible?
On Saturday, commissioner Greg Sankey attended Mizzou’s SEC/Big 12 Challenge game against TCU and shared his thoughts on how the league plans to schedule makeup dates (via PowerMizzou.com):
How do you expect the process to work with rescheduling postponed basketball games?
“You have to accept we may not be able to play everything, and we fought as hard as we could, fought being just the word of the struggle, in football. And eventually, you know, 69 of 71, if you’d have told us that in August, that would have been like a victory parade moment. So on basketball, on the men’s side, our (open) dates are late in the season, and intentionally so to try to move through. If we have multiple disruptions in a week, we may have the conversations like that Arkansas and Missouri shift to accommodate, and then a couple dates late where you could fill in. So the opportunity to play all the games still remains on the men’s side. Just this morning we announced on the women’s side, you know, appreciate Robin (Pingeton) and Jim (Sterk), we had a late disruption that actually caused a pivot on our testing protocols to test earlier so we didn’t have teams traveling with disruption, but announced the rescheduling of the Missouri at Auburn women’s game and I think three others. So we’ll be caught back up in women’s basketball February 7, and we don’t have room at the end, so that’s going to be a question of can you manipulate the schedule before the tournament, or you’ll have a loss of games. Which, Jim’s in the back of the room, I think I’ve been open and honest to say you may lose games. You have to be okay with that, and it’s going to be a percentage-based seeding with the tournament, but you may lose games. Don’t want to, but you may.”
There are still a few weeks left before the start of the conference tournament, so there’s time to make games up. But, for now, it sounds like Sankey is trying to prepare teams for the possibility of not fitting in all 18 league matchups.
We’ll see what happens as we turn our calendars to February.
Adam is a daily fantasy sports (DFS) and sports betting expert. A 2012 graduate of the University of Missouri, Adam now covers all 16 SEC football teams. He is the director of DFS, evergreen and newsletter content across all Saturday Football brands.
