Greg Sankey wants to see more changes to college football calendar

College football has seen a sea change over the last few years when it comes to the demands on coaches trying to manage several different aspects of their programs, starting with the college football calendar.

Some areas of the calendar have become particularly dense minefields of potential problems, changes and demands.

Take December to January, for example. College football coaches are now dealing with the end of their seasons, which can be accompanied by staff hirings and firings. Some are involved in bowl games or playoff runs. All while that is happening the NCAA transfer portal is opening up and players are jumping in and out left and right as they find new destinations. Coaches are also trying to lock up the majority of their high school signing classes ahead of the early signing period.

The sheer volume of responsibilities has led many college athletics leaders to wonder if change to the college football calendar might soon become necessary again.

“In talking with individual coaches since the end of the regular season, so some were locker rooms at bowl games where the frustration came out, some were individual meetings where I was on campus in January and February,” said SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, “We made December miserable for them.

“And then we’ve made April, May, June, too. Inherently the concern we have long-term is we lose the good people from the game, because the good people say, ‘You know what, I don’t want to do this. I have a spouse, I have children, I have relationships, I have my own mental well-being.’ We talk about student-athletes mental health, our coaches’ mental health is challenged in this environment. Yeah, they make a lot of money, but money doesn’t pay the bills when you’re dealing with some of the points of mental health that what this constant pace and this constant turmoil can produce.”

The college football calendar has become jam-packed in certain areas.

Many coaches have publicly complained about the transfer portal windows the NCAA designated being much longer than necessary. Others have bemoaned the dates of the early signing period.

Sankey hinted that changes are coming.

“Some of that work has been done around pieces of recruiting,” Sankey said on The Joel Klatt Show. “And you’ll see that play out, I expect, in the coming weeks if not months. The question is do we go deep enough? So you highlight an issue, and if you think about the preceding question on contributing decision-making authority in some centralized entity to just say, ‘This is how we’re going to do things.’

“You take early signing. We were very clear, very intentional to say you’re going to shift elements of what happens in football around decision-making, whether that’s around young people or around programs. And now we watch the pattern of coaching transition take place and lo and behold you go back to probably a letter I wrote in 2009 that says you’re going to shift much earlier the hiring pattern. And if you go back to when Alabama hired Nick Saban, that was a January decision. And we had that and other examples. And that wasn’t that long ago. I mean that’s within 15 years. Now if you wait to hire a head coach in January, the world has passed you by, probably for two recruiting cycles if you think it through.”

Sankey said the starting point for making decisions has to be making sure the student-athletes have all the information they need to make informed decisions about their future.

That, by extension, might require looking at possible second- and third-order effects of changes that have been implemented that have pushed other traditional periods on the college football calendar around.

“Now how do we dig in to understand what’s really happening?” Sankey said. “I would start from the reality there are several points of concern. So one is young people making decisions and providing the right information, the best information, the right timing to make that decision. We added transfers, so there’s a whole bunch more movement around the same time one set of young people, high school students, are trying to figure out where to go to college. And one of those key points of information is what does that roster look like?

“And now you have coaching transition, which is another key factor for those first two groups. How do I make a decision about where to align my life with people and whom I have a level of confidence and trust that they’re ready to prepare me best for my development?”

The SEC commissioner didn’t provide firm answers on what he or the conference might push toward the NCAA level in terms of changes.

But he knows the college football calendar is a problem that needs attention.

“Those are really important issues that I don’t know if I would use the word difficult, they just require work,” he said. “So if you walked in our back door, there’s a sign that our staff sees every day, there are two signs. One of them says problems yield to effort. So here are the problems, are we putting the right effort into the resolution? And that should rightly be a point of concern. And perhaps where our collaborative effort needs to develop.”