Can’t spell ‘silence’ without S-E-C (cha-ching!)
HOOVER, Ala. — Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey took the stage Monday at the home of this craze known as SEC Media Days to discuss the state of his league.
It was fitting that his intro music as he walked to the podium was “It’s a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong.
Now is a great time to be the king of the conference that is the king of conferences in the multibillion-dollar world of college sports. Wonderful, in fact.
Know this: The league is flush. Wicked flush. Like handing each school a check for tens of millions of dollars from bowls and TV deals flush.
Flush like your grandparents’ 12-gallon commode.
Flush like your nephew’s checks when your sister makes him wear that lederhosen get-up.
Flush like your Texas Hold’em hand you know is going to lose to a full boat. Flush like, well, you get the idea. But Sankey eschews that for the most part. Heck, the league no longer shares each school’s fiscal share — which the league also gets — until the middle of football season.
Still, Sankey’s reference to “five autonomy conferences” rather than the normal nomenclature of “Power Five” conferences seemed less like an accident and more like a verbal seeding that will plant roots.
Sankey’s glow, of course, was with a boatload of merit beyond the overflowing bottom line.
The SEC won five 2018-19 national titles and finished as the runner-up in five other sports. The SEC Network is
the gold standard by which all other college-sports-dedicated networks will forever be measured. There’s the cash and the panache and all that comes with being the biggest dog on the porch in the second-biggest sport behind the NFL.
That said, the most newsworthy item Sankey shared was the future landing spots of the cash cow known as the SEC football media event. Seriously.
Long-birthed and cultivated here in Hoover — a ritzy suburb of Birmingham — the event will head back to Atlanta and the College Football Hall of Fame next summer and go to Nashville for the 2021 summer. Not unlike how Chattanooga hatched the SEC women’s tournament, no good deed like growing and loving and embracing an event goes unpunished when the metroplexes become interested.
But the long-term future of the locations of the SEC Media Days are just a wrinkle in the unknown of the college sports future.
A future where we would all expect the SEC to be a prominent front-runner, but after Sankey’s comments we realize this morning the uncertainty of college sports as we walk blindly into the 2020s.
Think of it this way. Sankey, the man running the biggest ATM in college sports, was throwing curveballs, no balls and double-talk from the podium Monday that would have made Donald Trump or Dick Nixon proud.
Sankey wants federal regulations on sports betting, an issue that will challenge major college sports like SEC football more than any other. Why, you ask? Well, gamblers are not going to be able to afford to pay LeBron or Brady or any other $15-to-$35-million-ayear athlete to fix a single game.
A college kicker to shank a field goal when the stakes are meaningless but the point spread is so very meaningful? Yeah, those books and meals — did you know Arkansas spent more than $7 million on feeding its athletes in 2015-16 (the most recent year those numbers are available)? — seem like chicken scratch when Butch Jones is making $100,000 a month not to coach and the stadium is filled with folks forking over big bucks.
But Sankey also said the league is going to look at ways to expand scholarships in several sports. He mentioned baseball, softball and track and field — sports in which the SEC excel, mind you — as specific examples. That of course, would almost assuredly require reworking Title IX, the federal law demanding athletic budgetary balance for each gender.
More federal regulations, more leniency on current federal regulations? Your serve, Uncle Sam.
There were more than a few topics that swirl around college sports these days that Sankey was happy to skip.
There was no mention about the approved stadium alcohol policy. There was no mention about players getting compensation from their names, images or likenesses. There was no mention about the hand-wringing of the transfer portal or the NCAA interest in several programs, other than the appeal of the Missouri football probation.
Sankey clearly sees the value in volume and the joy of jazz hands.
Ah, SEC media daze … where the silence — like the Flakes and the checks — is golden.