Greg Sankey shares conversations questioning purpose of Alliance, brags about success of SEC

The Alliance — the Big 10, Pac-12 and ACC — has been a hot topic throughout the college football season. Ahead of Monday’s national championship, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey sounded off about its purpose.

Sankey, speaking with ESPN’s Paul Finebaum, was asking about the purpose of The Alliance. His comments come after College Football Playoff expansions appeared to stall once again.

“They know the Alliance was formed after the announced membership transition,” Sankey said. “Those conferences can explain themselves. I’ve asked directly: Is this about bloc voting, or attempting to exclude the Southeastern Conference? And I’ve been reassured repeatedly that’s not the case.

“They’ve done a nice job capturing their focus on mental health. We’ve been actually facilitating that work last four or five years, we haven’t provided advertising about that. Maybe we should look at that differently.”

Greg Sankey on the success of the SEC

Considering it’s an all-SEC national title game, the league has had a successful football season. After all, it’s hard to say otherwise when the national championship is a rematch of your conference championship.

He also reiterated the league is committed to its vision of being the best conference in the country.

“We are alive,” Sankey said. “I met Brian Kelly for the first time last Tuesday. and Brian was just asking me about the conference. My experience is that one of the things you’ll find out is alignment. Presidents, chancellors, athletic directors, coaches. That doesn’t mean there’s always agreement. But there’s a vision that we want to be the best, we want to be excellent across the board.

“And that attracted two new members for the future, puts two of our teams here tonight, we have more top-100 men’s basketball teams than anybody else. We got the number one women’s basketball team, and we just continue to succeed because of that alignment. And I’m excited about our future. And I’m not, I’m not distracted, our teams aren’t distracted by what’s happening around us. That’s why we continue forward.”

The national championship game is a rematch of last month’s SEC title game between No. 1 Alabama and No. 3 Georgia. The Crimson Tide won that game 41-24, which added that much more intrigue to the CFP championship rematch.

Alabama struck first with a field goal on its opening drive after a review overturned a Georgia scoop-and-score. The Crimson Tide are looking to repeat as national champions after beating Ohio State 52-24 in last season’s title game.