Storms elsewhere, but it’s all blue skies for Greg Sankey and the SEC

Two days before the Houston Chronicle broke the news that the world as the Big 12 knew it is over, I asked Greg Sankey if there was anything to the second-hand rumblings I had heard that Oklahoma and Texas had packed their bags for the SEC.

I’m not telling you this to say I knew it first; I didn’t know it well enough to tell anyone. I’m telling you this to tell you something about Sankey, the understated SEC commissioner whose power at this moment can’t be overstated.

Let’s start with that power: Sankey does not wear it like a uniform. Corner-office machismo does not waft off him like Axe off a teenaged boy. Sankey is comfortable in his humility, perhaps befitting a guy in his position who started out as the intramurals director at Utica College.

But it’s his personality, too. Sankey is happy to set up camp on the periphery of the gathering. He tweets his regular-guy persona regularly (he pinned a tweet April 14 announcing he had run at least 35 minutes for 365 consecutive days). He works through collaboration, herding his 14 — soon to be 16 — cats toward the decision he thinks best.

Sankey is professorial in demeanor, speaks in diagrammable sentences and answers in paragraphs. And Sankey has enough confidence in his ability to speak off the cuff that when I asked him, in a private setting at SEC Media Days in Hoover, Ala., about Texas and Oklahoma, he didn’t mislead, he didn’t bluff and he didn’t lie.

Sankey gave me a version of no comment. But he said the rumbles of realignment had increased over the past three weeks. And he told me a larger story, a description of what the SEC university presidents expected from him, a story that confirms implicitly, in retrospect, what he refused to confirm explicitly.

“I was told, ‘Your job is to take this to the next level,’ ” Sankey said. “I said, ‘We are the next level.’ ”

“No,” Sankey was told. “You need to figure out what the next level is.”

I asked him if he believed the increased rumbling portended a coming storm. At that point, remember, no one knew the story would break two days later (although I since have learned the schools planned to break it shortly after when it broke).

“People say, ‘That’s a really good question,’ or ‘That’s a really important question,’ ” Sankey said. “That’s a really contemplative question because there is so much on the plate right now. You think about conference structure. You think about NCAA structure. You think about federal interest. You think about litigation. You think about how you go through COVID.

“That’s a list right there. And as people try to think about their future, that makes it incredibly hard to plan effectively. I think that creates discomfort and is probably a set of contributions to the rumbles.”

An altering of the course

Texas and Oklahoma saw enough discomfort in their future that they broke the emergency glass. Think about the college administrators who don’t have the option of being taken in by the SEC. The future holds no answers. The rules of the past, the ones they have followed for their entire careers, no longer apply.

Student-athletes receiving money? We’re encouraging that now.

Moving from one campus to another without redshirting? We’re good with that now.

The NCAA is begging Congress to pass a national NIL rule, something that for years the NCAA refused to do for itself. NCAA president Mark Emmert, the Gorbachev of our time, said last month that his organization no longer can be the monolith that it has been.

“I tend to think we’ve undercommunicated the challenges that result,” Sankey said. “When you’re headed in one direction for so long and you alter course, that’s a shock. … The rules structure is the deregulation.”

The problem is that deregulation is not a rules structure. It’s going to take some time to figure all this out. If conferences are to step in and step up, their power only will increase.

That brings us back to Texas and Oklahoma. When they looked around for a home, they didn’t go back to the Pac-12, with which the schools nearly made a deal a decade ago. On July 21, we learned what Texas and Oklahoma figured out about the next level. In a collegiate world that’s never been more uncertain, there’s nothing more certain than the SEC.

Sankey resists the urge to soothe, to say that the SEC has all the answers. He recalled that at the height of the pandemic a year ago, he told school administrators within his conference to engage in “strategic thinking, not strategic planning, because things are changing so fast. If you planned, that plan would be disrupted, so you’d be back to strategic thinking. So you engage in strategic thinking.”

Since the news broke, Sankey has hidden his regular-guy persona in a publicity bunker. The guy who tweeted 16 times on July 19, the first day of SEC Media Days, who on the days leading up to the Texas-OU bombshell had tweeted on 39 of 48 days — including from his daughter’s wedding — has gone almost to radio silence. His only appearance on Twitter has been to re-tweet something about SEC athletes winning Olympic medals.

He gave an anodyne quote in an SEC news release announcing that the conference had granted membership to Texas and Oklahoma. He made a brief SEC Network appearance in which he encouraged his membership to utilize “blue-sky thinking” in how to approach a 16-team schedule.

Everywhere else in intercollegiate athletics, the storms are looming. In Sankey’s SEC, comparatively speaking, the blue days? All of them gone. Nothing but blue skies from now on.

(Sankey photo at top: Michael Wade/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)