Greg Sankey opens up on SEC scheduling, timeline for next steps

One of the biggest storylines of the offseason is what direction the SEC will go with its future scheduling. The league is preparing to increase to 16 teams in 2024 when Oklahoma and Texas join the league, and there’s been plenty of chatter about what direction commissioner Greg Sankey and conference officials will go.

Sankey said the scheduling process goes back years, before the idea of Oklahoma and Texas came to be. But once they entered the fray, Sankey and others around the SEC started back up on the research they started before the COVID-19 pandemic put discussions on hold.

Then, they hit the ground running to do what’s best for the conference, and the meetings in Destin appear to be a key date to watch.

“We have, really, between now and I think our spring meetings in Destin to go back to the fundamentals of why we’ve looked at different models,” Sankey said on The Paul Finebaum Show Friday. “Generally, a single division. Key question, eight or nine games. A lot of discussion about permanent opponents, one or three? And here’s the caution for everyone. We’re won’t have a schedule with only three teams on it, for example. We will have a schedule with eight or nine games, and the weighting of the schedule, the analysis of the schedule, has to be done with the full schedule. One of the opportunities here is to play everybody every other year and one or three teams every year. That’s a much tighter strength of schedule balance than what we’ve experienced in divisions.

“We know we can narrow the competitive disparity, and I think that’s an important part that gets lost in the conversation. Now, will things stay as some people think they are? We’ll see. Those are the decisions to be made between now and the end of May.”

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey: Talks of new schedule started one year before COVID-19 shutdown

The COVID-19 pandemic threw the sports world — and the world at large, for that matter — into uncertainty. Everything seemed to stop in March 2020. That includes conversations about changes to the SEC schedule, about two years before the league announced Oklahoma and Texas would join.

“Go back to July of ’21. [We] made an announcement we’re going to 16,” Sankey said. “The next month, we started with athletics directors meeting, talking about what do we want, what do we need, what kind of openness do we have to different approaches. Now understand, when we were here [at the SEC tournament] in March of 2020 and everything stopped, we had spent a year working through analytics, models and evaluation of our 14-team conference, our two-division model looking to see if there might be something else that would work.

“We were going to make a presentation to our presidents, and instead, we stopped everything. We put all of that work on the shelf for a full year, a little bit more.”

After the announcement confirming the SEC would go from 14 to 16 teams in 2024, Sankey and the athletic directors got to work. They also added two important voices to the conversation, and the talks have gone on ever since. It appears now, all eyes will be on Destin this spring.

“When we started again in August ’21, we had a really healthy foundation for what was going to go forward,” Sankey said. “We had an athletics directors meeting, we Zoomed in Joe Castiglione from Oklahoma and Chris Del Conte from Texas to talk about their thoughts, their experiences. Then, we went individually to each AD, interviewed them. So, we have done all kinds of pre-work.

“Last year, when we were by the beach, I said, ‘We’re poised to make a decision’ in Destin and we ultimately decided to just wait when we learn some more. And we have.”