Greg Sankey addresses meeting with Tony Petitti: Why ‘the threats of diverge are real’

It has now been widely reported that the SEC and Big Ten athletic directors are meeting to discuss several major challenges facing college athletics, as well as the future of the two conferences. Naturally, conference commissioners Greg Sankey and Tony Petitti will also be in attendance.

While speaking about the meeting on The Triple Option, Sankey addressed that upcoming meeting, adding that there is a chance that they could see a divergence depending on the priorities and realities of different institutions.

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“The reality, though, is when you show up in a room and are trying to debate when we should recruit, how we should recruit, it’s a whole different reality,” Greg Sankey said. “Some in Division I sponsor sports just so they can build their enrollment profile. That’s not our reality. Sure, it’s an enrollment process but there’s a lot more happening here and those differences have to be recognized and that’s where I think the decision-making process has to change. If it doesn’t change, that’s when the threats of diverge are real. We’re gonna have to figure something out under the Big Ten and if we can’t then we’re going to have a very different reality in the future.”

Greg Sankey emphasized that the priorities of the SEC are not the priorities of every athletic conference. That difference is going to create a landscape that looks different from one institution to the next.

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“I’ll take one of these issues that’s been over time. I was commissioner of the Southland Conference 25 years ago…great experiences but a different world. I show up here and there’s all these accusations about coaches are bumping people in the hallways. You look at it and say, ‘Who cares?’ You can’t walk in as the head coach at any of our universities and not have people talk to you. I remember somebody complaining about Lou Holtz walking through a high school hallway. This is like my first month and I have to deal with that. That doesn’t happen every place and that’s to me a microcosm of the lack of understanding that exists nationally where I think we should be having those types of conversations between our coaches and kids in 9th grade. Give them an aspirational goal, come play for our program,” Sankey said.

“Then you get down to the expectations, the pressure, and the support… There’s great support for our programs but with that great support, there are a different level of external expectations…[Urban Meyer], you go to Florida, you still have that internal expectation, I think this is across the board for our coaches, but then you have all these external expectations. You’ve got great support and that’s a whole different way of living, way of thinking, way of dealing with things. I respect greatly. In fact, I’ve gone to coaches to say, ‘Hey, thanks for being a part of the SEC because you came from someplace else and you had a decision whether you wanted to jump into this and challenge yourself that way.’ And I have great respect for those folks who do that.”

Greg Sankey was also asked about the relationship that he currently has with Tony Petitti. In particular, the chance that the two of them are overseeing what could be the only true power conferences moving forward in college football.

“I started in this role in 2015, and even though I knew all the commissioners at that time, I’m the new guy in the chair. It is different to be in the chair. You can be as close to it as you want, I’ve told staff in our office, the most cherished words are ‘I think that.’ So, Urban, you’ve worked with coordinators and assistant coaches, ‘Hey, Coach, I think that.’ Then somebody has to make the decision. You have to make the decision… So, in 2015, I’m new…then, when you’d gone through Covid, we’d had a change in the Big Ten and then post-Covid, everybody else changed,” Sankey said.

“So, all of a sudden, I’m the longest-tenured among those commissioners. Then, we’ve had the Pac-12, as we knew it, evaporate as you will. So, just looking around, Tony is someone who I knew from his work with CBS and then just with Major League Baseball we were in some meetings together when I was the SEC Commissioner. He reached out to me pretty early on and part of my observation relative to our meetings, and it’s an outgrowth of an advisory group we formed in the spring, is if we can set a direction that we can agree on, others have the opportunity to participate and follow.”

There’s a lot for the SEC and the Big Ten to discuss in their meeting. That includes things like enforcement, the College Football Playoff, and a potential scheduling agreement. Despite all of that being on the table, Greg Sankey doesn’t expect major changes from one meeting.

“So, that’s the fundamental and it’s not as if we’re just going to unilaterally change the world in an athletic directors meeting, but we do need to talk about issues around legal settlements to the extent that we’re allowed to legally. We have to be careful about the boundaries… There was a report about we were going to have a scheduling agreement. Well, we’ve played basketball challenges with people. Should we be talking about those things? I think certainly. Will that change things? Tony and I have talked about how playing rules are made. We’ve talked about how decisions are made in the NCAA and I think one of my learning lessons over the last decade is we have enormous challenges in front of college sports,” Sankey said.

“We have enormous opportunities and enormous support, we’re not going to meet the challenges in front of us in big rooms filled with people, which is kind of the NCAA way because there’s so much disparity among the programs and this ability to move from the way we’ve always done things to the way we’re gonna need to do things is accelerating rapidly. So, that causes us to narrow the conversation a bit.”

College sports are changing rapidly. For the SEC and the Big Ten, before anything else happens, the two sides need to see if they’re able to be on the same page moving forward or not.

“What we want to do is bring people into that conversation eventually, but it starts with can the two conferences come together around some common thoughts?”