From Radio Row: Greg Sankey, Southeastern Conference commissioner

On Wednesday morning from Radio Row at SEC Media Days 2024, Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey joined TexAgs Radio to discuss the current state of the 16-team league, the week in Dallas and much, much more.

Key notes from Greg Sankey interview

• I’m well. It's good to be here, and it's great to be in Dallas.
   
• I was encouraged while walking around at the Home Run Derby that they were going to bring back the home and away uniforms for the MLB All-Star Game, but you can tell that it's Aaron Judge out there because he's huge. I would love to do the calculation for the starting nine’s salary value, for each team. Talk about talent.
   
• I was at the Home Run Derby and sat right behind Paul Skenes, who was pitching in Hoover a year ago, and he started for the National League team on Tuesday night. Credit to him.
   
• You saw Iván “Pudge” Rodríguez and Nolan Ryan roll out there along with Ferguson Jenkins pregame on Tuesday, and I would go see Nolan pitch every time he was at home in Arlington Stadium. Now to have Globe Life Field, you appreciate air conditioning. You remember how much fun it was to go to those older places, but man, it was hot.
   
• My first Rangers game was in April of 1983. I was in college, and I still have the program with Jim Sundberg’s autograph.
   
• The effort to go to Dallas was in 2017. This was going to be the first location off my mind to relocate media days with Birmingham. We are west already. You think about the timing, and it was Jimbo Fisher’s first year in July of 2018. The effort was to be here in July of 2018, because it would have been perfect if Alabama won the national championship. They played Georgia, and we logistically could not find the venue and space at the right time.
   
• We kept working on it. COVID-19 and expansion had said we just need to be in Dallas the first time we are at 16 teams. Having tried to do it for like six or eight years, it is rewarding to be here. It was the right time to make it happen. My sense is that it's been successful. I think the number of credential requests went up. We have a lot of our core eastern members still represented, and we brought in media markets.
   
• I was an associate commissioner when Texas played Arkansas in 2004, and I made the trip with Mike Slive. We landed at the airport, and we were on a shuttle bus forever because there were so many planes, and then there was the intensity of the game.
   
• Move forward to 2021, we made the invitation and the announcement of Texas and Oklahoma entering. Texas plays in Fayetteville. Arkansas wins, and the field gets rushed, which you're not supposed to do. That was an intense environment all day, and you hit on the one that people don't quite understand while the other ones are more natural.
   
• We had two Big Eight members on Tuesday afternoon at Media Day, so there are a lot of relationships that exist. I think the ironic one is the Board of Regents lawsuit from 1984 when the Board of Regents at Oklahoma and Georgia sued the NCAA to free up television rights. So, there's a lot of undercurrent that exists within our current configuration.
   
• Well, I would have tied my shoes tighter and maybe put a helmet on if I told the 2018 version of myself that this was the current landscape of college football. There are some things that were foreseeable and some that were not. The fact that we have been in litigation was foreseeable at that time. The fact that we needed to be in federal relations activity, I identified in 2015. In 2018, we were a year away from California adopting the first NIL law, but we were active in thinking about that.
   
• What I would say to myself now, looking back, is how do you help people understand that change that has been talked about on the outside is coming, and we have to lead from the inside. That was a big part of my commentary on Monday. There are all kinds of ideas out there. Just because there are ideas doesn’t mean there are solutions. There's not an element of those ideas that we can't drive internally. We just have to become comfortable making that change inside college athletics rather than having it be driven in externally, and that is hard.
   
• The difficulty is it is seen as working really well. We have 108,000 people in a stadium. College football is great. We have people graduating at a higher rate. It's great, and they can go to the pros or they can stay. NIL lets them make that decision. We have to come back and address some of the underlying tensions that have been created since that time.
   
• Look at LIV Golf and the PGA Tour right now. Is professional golf healthy? There's private equity, outside capital, and I'm sure, lawyers are involved. There are ideas, but we're now watching The Masters, and maybe there's somebody there we don't see. We watch the U.S. Open, and we see people there that we expect, and we're going to see the British Open. What else do you really watch?
   
• It used to be a ritual, and that's not healthy. If you're really into auto racing that goes back to the Indy days, with USAC running it, and Johnny Rutherford and A.J. Foyt, and who do we have now? It's just a different reality. We have to be careful when pursuing solutions. Don't create a divide that can't be healed and recovered from.
   
• One technology advancement we have is the sideline-to-headset communication for the player on each side of the ball. Does that manifest itself in a way that solves problems, or does it have no meaning? The NFL doesn't have hurry-up offenses, but we have them all over the place.
   
• Another one is the iPad technology. The NFL uses Surface, but we wanted to look around to see if we could be a little different. Tim Cook is an Auburn graduate. That's not why this happened, but their use of that adaptable technology is meaningful.
   
• With Artificial Intelligence, we have a panel tomorrow where we are going to talk about where it can help us. Can it help in scheduling? Can it help in officiating? You think about automatic strikes and balls in baseball. Think about all the things that happen pre-snap. Some of them are static, and some of them are not. Are there ways that machines can help us become more effective?
   
• Then there's the simple things like the TV timeout clock. We were at the All-Star Game, and there was a time for everything. Well, we created the TV timeout clock in football. So to see what Artificial Intelligence actually means... Are there some practical ways that we can use technology to improve the experience? I think all of those are under the conversation and are relevant to what may be there in the future.
   
• My place is in upstate New York, in the Finger Lakes region, and we have a two-bedroom place there that is my happy spot. I just feel better. I went there around the Fourth of July. I flew down here from Syracuse. The weather was beautiful, and the water was great. That's a good spot for me.
   
• If I want a big vacation, my brother lives on the island of Lanai. He's a high school teacher in Hawaii. Your RPMs drop off there. Then there's a place in the Broadmoor, Cloud Camp, which is on the mountain behind it, and we're going to grab a weekend there.
   
• I missed a Zac Brown Band concert. I had tickets, but then events conspired to keep me away. I have tried to see Steve Martin and Martin Short with the Steep Canyon Rangers. I saw U2 at The Sphere, and it was awesome. The visuals and the audio were awesome.
   
• The two most interesting books I've read are John Mitchum’s biography of Abraham Lincoln because when you think you have problems, read about Lincoln's life. Erik Larson wrote a book about the circumstances in the country leading up to Fort Sumter from both the perspectives of DC and the southern states. I thought Larsen’s book was fascinating because it's almost a play-by-play.
   
• That's really up to the schools whether Texas A&M and Texas want to play on Thanksgiving. We scheduled it on Saturday. I think the celebratory reality is we're going to be in College Station with the renewal of that game. It'll be an incredible environment. We don't have a Thursday game this year. The NFL is putting out more and more content, and I don't want to detract from your enormous games.