Photo by Kirby Clarke, TexAgs
Texas A&M Football
"That was four of 14 institutions (that had offseason issues this year) which means there are 10 places that don't have those problems. Each of those issues are isolated realities. You have one incoming freshman at Mississippi State out of 350 incoming freshman who stepped in when his sister was in a fight and there was ugly video. There needs to be some understanding of background there. There is a settlement of a lawsuit at Tennessee allegedly around sexual assault and the result was that there was not an admission of guilt that those claims are right, there is not a claim that they are necessarily wrong, but there was a settlement. That's very different than other circumstances that are out there nationally. At Alabama, you had two players arrested but not charged. Ole Miss has an infractions case. It's not the first we've had, but I would love for it to be our last.
We need it to conclude. Part of the pain of these processes is lingering. I could look around the landscape and start pointing fingers at people, but I don't worry about them. I worry about me. I think the image of the conference is strong. We're not going to apologize for competitive success. We want to avoid missteps, and I was very clear about that on Monday. Those four incidents, I can count them on one hand, have received so much attention indicates they are easy to write about some. They should be written about, I wouldn't deny that at all. But there is much greater good being done through this conference through our athletics teams and universities. It's interesting in the lack of interest in really writing about some of those great stories, Myles Garrett being one.
“I acknowledged in Destin at the end of our meetings that we had taken another step forward, that many others have not, on review of transfer student athlete misconduct. There is a relevant basis for that action. There are adults who have been in generally similar settings on university campuses. There are certain types of what we call ‘serious misconduct’ and their ability to transfer and receive athletic aid and participate is inhibited. With incoming freshman, you don’t necessarily have adults; you don’t necessarily have the same living circumstances or availability to the same information. Yes, we said we would continue in conversation because we want to be attentive to the fact that what we had 20 years ago might have been a local story, if that, around an individual players behavior now scrolls across the bottom of the SEC Network or ESPN immediately and it is national news. That has to guide some of our conversation and thinking.”
“We love having the Aggies. When I go to a Texas A&M game, and it is almost without regard, the number and the prominence of SEC logo displays around tailgating before football games is awesome, number one. Number two, there was a baseball game, non-conference baseball game, and it was a ninth inning victory and there was a little bit of disagreement, shall we say, between the two teams. One of which was the Aggies' baseball team, and the crowd started chanting ‘SEC! SEC!' I called Scott Woodward the next morning and told him that we didn’t want those types of disagreements, but your crowd was awesome. That is an official statement from the commissioners office.”
“The interest builds when teams get to travel to every SEC school. Nashville last year, we sent A&M there twice. The Vanderbilt game you could plan for in advance. Our conference has spent a great deal of time talking about football scheduling, particularly post expansion, the rigors of the schedule and the strength of this league make eight games the right number. We could talk about a lot of different models, and we did, we talked about every idea. We said that eight, especially for an SEC West division school there is nothing more difficult as it relates to a football schedule in the country at the college level than going through that schedule successfully.
This year we have added the expectation of a ninth non-conference game that would be against an opponent from one of the other five autonomy conferences. A&M has UCLA coming to College Station, and I plan to be there for that game. We think that is the right place. I know there is a desire to see Knoxville, Gainesville, and Athens, the other Columbia because you have seen one Columbia with frequency, but that will come over time and we think we are in the right place.”
“What has surprised me is that you can be as close to the chair, if you will, as I was working closely with Mike (Slive) for a decade. But, until you are in that chair you don’t fully realized and appreciate the role. That is not a specific surprise. You move from an advisor, and I had done this earlier when I lived in Texas for 11 years where I was commissioner of the Southland Conference and moved up internally there. Remember I was 31 years old, and I had to make all of the decisions. I was prepared for that and my first week we had some issues about advertising on the SEC Network and everyone gave me their advice and I finally looked around and remembered that it was my decision.
This job never stops, that is part of the energy and the challenge. It is a constant pace and you need to be careful to find some space to rest and recover and think. That has probably been the bigger reality as you go into the days and do a lot of work and a lot of thinking and dealing with issues and people. Looking forward, if you don’t prepare for that, time just slips away and all of the sudden there is no time to enact a plan because everything is now behind you.”
“With no commitment (to moving the SEC Media Days elsewhere), the answer is yes. We will get through today and we will take our breath and continue to evaluate what we do in the future. The baseball tournament is a really good example. We actually had a deep dive, but we stayed in Hoover, where Texas A&M won the tournament championship this year. We had some opportunities, shall we say, by the host to create a full campus that you wont see anywhere else in college baseball. We will take some time to think, but Hoover has been a good home. It is accessible, relatively speaking, but we will definitely see what the future might hold.”
“Myles Garrett’s representation is awesome. I will tell you a quick story. In January, the NCAA had its convention in San Antonio. We talked a lot about this time demand stuff, which I think is mislabeled, I think it is time balance and how you make the right time commitments. I had met with some student athletes from other conferences and heard everything that is wrong in college athletics. One of the meetings that we had for 90 minutes was one of the most depressing 90 minutes of my entire year. On Tuesday of the next week I had a head cold and wasn’t feeling well, I had two and a half hours with about three-dozen of the Aggie student athletes and it was phenomenal. They were phenomenal. The people who are Texas A&M fans should be incredibly proud of the young people that represent their university.
Myles Garrett is a part of that. He is out in the front. You get to learn as you prepare your remarks and I learned that him and I share an affinity for reading. I got busy and didn’t get a chance to say hello to him, which is something I need to correct soon. He is not alone, there is a receiver on the football team and we asked him what time he worked out. He answered ‘5:30 in the morning’. We began to think ‘Oh, here we go. Coach makes me workout at 5:30 in the morning’. He is an engineering major and he says ‘No, that is what I want to do, I want to lift at 5:30 in the morning, it gets my day going’. We asked how their coaches work around any class schedule issues and they got to talk about that and it was exactly what you want in college athletics. I think that Myles and that experience that day is so positively reflective of real life. Not the criticisms, not the headlines, that is what goes on 99% of the time in college athletics.”
Greg Sankey discusses the SEC's image, A&M's student-athletes
Key quotes from Greg Sankey interview
"Herb Vincent and our staff came to me early last week and said, 'We'd like to make this adjustment (adding information on each coach as he is introduced to the media).' The schedule is already so busy that my first reaction was, 'Is that even possible?' Last year was the first year the SEC Network was actually here and we realized there were some opportunities, this being one. It shows a bit of a relationship to be able to talk about them. One of the things I've learned is to note a few more anecdotes throughout the year because we talk and I have good relationships with them all. Yesterday for example with Barry Odom, one of the great things I've seen around the Missouri program is the way the football team reacted when he was hired.""That was four of 14 institutions (that had offseason issues this year) which means there are 10 places that don't have those problems. Each of those issues are isolated realities. You have one incoming freshman at Mississippi State out of 350 incoming freshman who stepped in when his sister was in a fight and there was ugly video. There needs to be some understanding of background there. There is a settlement of a lawsuit at Tennessee allegedly around sexual assault and the result was that there was not an admission of guilt that those claims are right, there is not a claim that they are necessarily wrong, but there was a settlement. That's very different than other circumstances that are out there nationally. At Alabama, you had two players arrested but not charged. Ole Miss has an infractions case. It's not the first we've had, but I would love for it to be our last.
We need it to conclude. Part of the pain of these processes is lingering. I could look around the landscape and start pointing fingers at people, but I don't worry about them. I worry about me. I think the image of the conference is strong. We're not going to apologize for competitive success. We want to avoid missteps, and I was very clear about that on Monday. Those four incidents, I can count them on one hand, have received so much attention indicates they are easy to write about some. They should be written about, I wouldn't deny that at all. But there is much greater good being done through this conference through our athletics teams and universities. It's interesting in the lack of interest in really writing about some of those great stories, Myles Garrett being one.
“I acknowledged in Destin at the end of our meetings that we had taken another step forward, that many others have not, on review of transfer student athlete misconduct. There is a relevant basis for that action. There are adults who have been in generally similar settings on university campuses. There are certain types of what we call ‘serious misconduct’ and their ability to transfer and receive athletic aid and participate is inhibited. With incoming freshman, you don’t necessarily have adults; you don’t necessarily have the same living circumstances or availability to the same information. Yes, we said we would continue in conversation because we want to be attentive to the fact that what we had 20 years ago might have been a local story, if that, around an individual players behavior now scrolls across the bottom of the SEC Network or ESPN immediately and it is national news. That has to guide some of our conversation and thinking.”
“We love having the Aggies. When I go to a Texas A&M game, and it is almost without regard, the number and the prominence of SEC logo displays around tailgating before football games is awesome, number one. Number two, there was a baseball game, non-conference baseball game, and it was a ninth inning victory and there was a little bit of disagreement, shall we say, between the two teams. One of which was the Aggies' baseball team, and the crowd started chanting ‘SEC! SEC!' I called Scott Woodward the next morning and told him that we didn’t want those types of disagreements, but your crowd was awesome. That is an official statement from the commissioners office.”
“The interest builds when teams get to travel to every SEC school. Nashville last year, we sent A&M there twice. The Vanderbilt game you could plan for in advance. Our conference has spent a great deal of time talking about football scheduling, particularly post expansion, the rigors of the schedule and the strength of this league make eight games the right number. We could talk about a lot of different models, and we did, we talked about every idea. We said that eight, especially for an SEC West division school there is nothing more difficult as it relates to a football schedule in the country at the college level than going through that schedule successfully.
This year we have added the expectation of a ninth non-conference game that would be against an opponent from one of the other five autonomy conferences. A&M has UCLA coming to College Station, and I plan to be there for that game. We think that is the right place. I know there is a desire to see Knoxville, Gainesville, and Athens, the other Columbia because you have seen one Columbia with frequency, but that will come over time and we think we are in the right place.”
“What has surprised me is that you can be as close to the chair, if you will, as I was working closely with Mike (Slive) for a decade. But, until you are in that chair you don’t fully realized and appreciate the role. That is not a specific surprise. You move from an advisor, and I had done this earlier when I lived in Texas for 11 years where I was commissioner of the Southland Conference and moved up internally there. Remember I was 31 years old, and I had to make all of the decisions. I was prepared for that and my first week we had some issues about advertising on the SEC Network and everyone gave me their advice and I finally looked around and remembered that it was my decision.
This job never stops, that is part of the energy and the challenge. It is a constant pace and you need to be careful to find some space to rest and recover and think. That has probably been the bigger reality as you go into the days and do a lot of work and a lot of thinking and dealing with issues and people. Looking forward, if you don’t prepare for that, time just slips away and all of the sudden there is no time to enact a plan because everything is now behind you.”
“With no commitment (to moving the SEC Media Days elsewhere), the answer is yes. We will get through today and we will take our breath and continue to evaluate what we do in the future. The baseball tournament is a really good example. We actually had a deep dive, but we stayed in Hoover, where Texas A&M won the tournament championship this year. We had some opportunities, shall we say, by the host to create a full campus that you wont see anywhere else in college baseball. We will take some time to think, but Hoover has been a good home. It is accessible, relatively speaking, but we will definitely see what the future might hold.”
“Myles Garrett’s representation is awesome. I will tell you a quick story. In January, the NCAA had its convention in San Antonio. We talked a lot about this time demand stuff, which I think is mislabeled, I think it is time balance and how you make the right time commitments. I had met with some student athletes from other conferences and heard everything that is wrong in college athletics. One of the meetings that we had for 90 minutes was one of the most depressing 90 minutes of my entire year. On Tuesday of the next week I had a head cold and wasn’t feeling well, I had two and a half hours with about three-dozen of the Aggie student athletes and it was phenomenal. They were phenomenal. The people who are Texas A&M fans should be incredibly proud of the young people that represent their university.
Myles Garrett is a part of that. He is out in the front. You get to learn as you prepare your remarks and I learned that him and I share an affinity for reading. I got busy and didn’t get a chance to say hello to him, which is something I need to correct soon. He is not alone, there is a receiver on the football team and we asked him what time he worked out. He answered ‘5:30 in the morning’. We began to think ‘Oh, here we go. Coach makes me workout at 5:30 in the morning’. He is an engineering major and he says ‘No, that is what I want to do, I want to lift at 5:30 in the morning, it gets my day going’. We asked how their coaches work around any class schedule issues and they got to talk about that and it was exactly what you want in college athletics. I think that Myles and that experience that day is so positively reflective of real life. Not the criticisms, not the headlines, that is what goes on 99% of the time in college athletics.”
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