Greg Sankey opens up on legal ramifications of splitting settlement money among various sports

After a watershed week in college sports ahead of Memorial Day, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey headed to Destin for the league’s annual Spring Meetings, where he answered questions on the new changes Monday evening.

The transformative lawsuit House v. NCAA was finally settled last week, allowing for payment to athletes of the past while also providing a model of revenue-sharing for the future. Schools will now have an allotted amount of money in their athletics budget to share with their student-athletes — although the rules of how they’re allowed to do so are still up for debate.

During his press conference Monday in Destin, Sankey was asked how the ZEC plans to avoid more legal battles when it comes to how they disperse the allotted money that’s shared with athletes.

The reporter specifically asked how Sankey and the league will handle potential concerns such as athletes getting jealous over which sports make more money.

“It’s a big world out there with a lot of legal ramifications,” answered Sankey. “So we had, what, four or five lawsuits with legal ramifications? And we are going to be diligent in working through the outcomes around dealing with what we’ve announced from a settlement standpoint.

“As I indicated earlier, there is no kind of looking back. We’re in that process right now and will be for months.”

Several days earlier at the SEC Baseball Tournament in Hoover, Alabama, Sankey shared similar comments explaining that the process simply has to play out over the next few months.

“The next couple of months will be that process – the ability to walk through the legal system, the court system, a longer-form agreement,” he said. “Decisions that can be made, then, at the conference level about certain structural issues, some national policy changes that need to take place. And then, it goes through the legal process that takes months upon months.”

Progress will continue to be slow as these massive changes take place in college sports, according to the SEC commissioner.

It’s clear there is a lot on the agenda for school and conference leaders over the coming months. They now need to figure out how to finance paying back their portion of the back damages owed in the settlement, as well as dispersing roughly $20 million per year the NCAA provides for current athletes.