Greg Sankey details his weekly schedule during football season

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey is one of the more powerful men in college sports, but he still deals with a problem common to millions of men around the world: His wife wishes he’d stay off his phone during church on Sunday. That, however, just might not be in the cards for Sankey.

Despite that “point of friction” between him and Mrs. Sankey, the SEC commissioner’s weekly football schedule falls together nicely around the ebbs and tides of fall. And it all gets going on Saturday, basically Monday for Sankey.

“I’m up, usually watching a little bit of pregame. I actually enjoy the early games because I can stand there, and for just 10 minutes, really enjoy the experience, because there’s not everything else going on at once. Whether I go to one or two games is a basis of location and schedule. So, I actually have my first four weeks, Week 0 through Week 3 plotted out. And I’ve got two doubleheaders on Saturdays. You’re paying attention, but when you travel, you don’t know what’s going on. The Covid year, I’d stay in my office and watch. And I knew in a moment if I had an issue or what the issue may be. So I may be in the air without Wi-Fi, turn my phone on — which has happened with some level of frequency — and it was like ‘boom, something has happened,'” Sankey said on “McElroy and Cubelic In The Morning” during SEC Media Days last week.

Whether he’s on the road or at the league offices, Sankey spends most of Saturday fielding and responding to the various issues under his purview, from the TV broadcasts to game operations to officiating.

And he won’t go to bed on Saturday until he’s gotten a rundown of what’s happened that day and what he might be addressing on Sunday when he’s trying to fill a church pew.

Sankey joked that the late games almost always seem to have the most controversy. In recent years, there was the delay in the Ole Miss–Tennessee game involving mustard and golf balls, plus the thrown shoe in an LSU–Florida game, just to name a couple of night games that have gotten weird in the SEC.

“And it may be 10, 11 o’clock at night and there may be — there’s going to be issues. It’s always the last game of the day. We should put the controversial game first. It seems to always be the last game of the day,” Sankey said.

From there, he’s “at the mercy of” Sundays. If Saturday is starting things off with a bang, Sunday is when Sankey is making sure the confetti is getting cleaned up and everyone will be ready for the next week. He said he likes to have any issues stemming from the previous game day to be resolved by Wednesday at the latest, but ideally by Monday afternoon — basically whatever he doesn’t get to on Sunday.

“And Monday we start with, there might be some immediate things Monday morning, going to a video review from about 10 until noon with our officiating group and other game management issues. Our staff manages game management. If I have to make phone calls, if there are problems I have to deal with, I prefer to have those done by Monday,” Sankey said. “Tuesday is a little bit less intense from clean up. Wednesday, things need to be done. And then Thursday and Friday I can do my real job. Things aren’t always messy. There’s always going to be phone calls and questions.”

And sometimes, when it all lines up well, he’s not ducking out of church on a Sunday morning to field calls about late game clock operations or officiating assignments.