Greg Sankey reflects on role in college football's decision to play 2020 season amid COVID concerns

It’s now been half a decade since the COVID-19 Pandemic hit and threw the world into uncertainty. While college football may not have been the most important concern for many during the pandemic, it was still a major question before each conference ended up making its own, unique decisions on how to handle the situation.

For SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, there was a lot of pressure on him to make the right decision for the league. After deciding to play an adjusted schedule in 2020 before getting back to normalcy, Sankey has had time to reflect on his role in that decision, which he remembers as looking to do the right thing to bring people hope.

“Well, that’s a good question,” Greg Sankey said to The Post and Courier. “I really thought about, in the moments, about the people attached to the programs. And I had a lot of great input — Dr. Stella Self, who I’ve never met in person but on a video conference. She’s in South Carolina (USC’s Arnold School of Public Health), is a biostatistician who really early on gave us great advice. Gus Malzahn was at Auburn. He said, ‘When you speak, people are listening for hope.’ This was in March [2020], and that really guided how I communicated.”

In the end, the SEC made the decision not to play non-conference games due to COVID. That allowed conferences to enforce their testing and safety standards better. Instead, the SEC played 10 conference games in the regular season.

“And we had some young people that we lost, if you will, that just kind of walked away from the experience. So, I think those who were critical of us trying to play lived in some notion that we could just stop and things would come back at some point. I just didn’t see it that way. And we weren’t going to be careless in moving forward. We wanted to do it with great care. Part of that care is the opportunities for young people, the connections to their team, the foundations of the competitive and educational experience,” Sankey said. “And the fact that time marches on, whether you want it to or not. Time marches on. Those were the thoughts that really formed the approach.”

The season was a weird one, but ended successfully for the SEC. The Alabama Crimson Tide won the national championship and DeVonta Smith would win the Heisman Trophy.

For Greg Sankey, making the decision to adjust the season the way he did during COVID was incredibly difficult. Since then, there have been massive changes to the sports world and there have been several new commissioners and administrators entering college athletics. Part of why Sankey believes he’s still here is how he handled COVID.

“We had so much change in leaders at the commissioner level around that time,” Sankey said. “Both before and after, and change on campus. You had the onset of name, image, and likeness activity. There’s just so much that’s gone on in those last five years. I’m not sure I can boil it down to what if we hadn’t played. I think we would have regretted not playing. I truly do. I think if the one thing I could say, we just shut down and not done anything, I think we would have looked back and said, ‘Wow, we could have tried harder.'”

It was a distinctly different approach in the SEC than some other conferences. Then Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren was more tentative about play games and ended up playing a much more abbreviated schedule. The same thing happened to the Pac-12 under Larry Scott.

“And that was really the way I viewed things. We had a responsibility to exhaust every avenue. If we couldn’t play, we couldn’t. Get the best advice, make the best decisions, understand you’re making judgments. It was hard. But I think every one of those teams, I don’t know if it’s 10 years after, I don’t care about what their record was, ought to be honored for making the effort in the 2021 year,” Sankey said.

“And one of the cool things is Kentucky won the volleyball national championship that year — we’d never won a volleyball national championship in this league. The young women who played indoors, not in the bubble, that was the first sport to do that. They had a lot of questions. The fact they trusted us and we earned that reward as a league, our first one, and particularly for Kentucky’s program … that’s one of my cherished memories, being in Omaha for that national championship.”

The final point that Greg Sankey made was an interesting and important one. While most attention was put on football that season, COVID had its impact across athletics.