Greg Sankey discusses behind-the-scenes conversations around SEC during whirlwind week of realignment

While two of the preeminent football conferences in college sports cannibalized another late last week and over the weekend — the Big Ten and Big 12 will be, together, taking eight teams from the Pac-12 come 2024 — the SEC sat and watched. But there wasn’t a shortage of internal chatter, according to commissioner Greg Sankey.

Speaking with Paul Finebaum on the SEC Network on Tuesday, Sankey recalled the bad vibes around the league office and among sports administrators in the conference over the weekend. He took his share of blame of upsetting the status quo two years back by adding Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC, but said this past weekend was a different feeling.

“It just wasn’t one of those great feelings to work in college sports, in my experience. And again, I take responsibility where we’ve made moves, but there was something different last week about — really there are still questions around the existence of the Pac-12 Conference given it’s long and storied history,” Sankey said.

Sankey also made clear that while there had been outside projections, predictions and pronouncements, the SEC wasn’t looking to add anyone and no one from the outside came calling.

“And even for me, with the security of the Southeastern Conference, whether it was Friday afternoon or the beginning of the day Saturday fielding phone calls, which really were more conversations — ‘What do you think’s happening?’ — there was nobody calling me seeking or demanding entry. A lot of commentary publicly,” Sankey said.

While in the pulpit with Finebaum, Sankey also addressed those outside voices amid realignment.

Ever since the SEC added Texas and Oklahoma, there has been suspicion that the league might look to break into new geography areas while remaining contiguous. That would mean adding schools like Virginia or North Carolina. Further, it’s been speculated the SEC could add Florida State and Clemson, among others, as ire grows over the widening revenue gap for ACC teams.

Sankey doesn’t find it to be helpful to have rampant outside speculation about what might come next.

“There was plenty of criticism back in 2021 at the surprise nature of our Oklahoma and Texas announcement. Yet from that point forward, we and those two universities and our entire conference has sought to be orderly in the process and respectful in our communication and I think we’ve done that,” Sankey said. “…I think that the speculation, some of the pronouncements we’ve seen since that time about growth and directional growth is problematic.”