Greg Sankey Details SEC Expansion, Paying Players, Future Schedule Plans

With the SEC media days completed, the news around college football's premier conference has yet  to die down.

The most prominent voice in the conference, commissioner Greg Sankey, gave a lengthy interview to CBS Sports sharing several answers to important questions facing the SEC. What should be done regarding conference scheduling, further expansion, even geographically, and how will the league handle schools directly paying players? 

It's a wild time in college football, and while Sankey did say he doesn't have all the answers, there's plenty of interesting tidbits to take away from one of the game's brightest minds.

When addressing speculation about the potential for premiere ACC programs to bolt, Sankey didn't deny that further additions could make sense.

"We're a national conference that has a regional platform," Sankey said "I don't think you have the luxury of never saying never in this world, but I think our focus has been appropriate and I think our decisions have been justified based on what's happened over the last three years. We're not reacting. We were on the front and the focus on 16 (universities) is real with the responsibility to be aware of what's happening around us."

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey. (Photo by Johnnie Izquierdo/Getty Images)

Greg Sankey Addresses Challenges Of Paying Players, Scheduling

When asked about the revenue distribution share and how the SEC expects to pay for the increased cost of fielding programs, Sankey was entirely noncommittal.

To every question, he responded with a short "That remains to be seen," illustrating how difficult these issues will be for administrators and university officials to solve.

He was far more verbose when discussing the potential for the SEC to move to a nine-game conference schedule. Initially, Sankey and his team had prepared a presentation to the teams in 2020 to move to nine games, but said that with expansion and a different competitive landscape now, many of the examples and data they collected are no longer relevant. 

But the conversations are ongoing, though potentially on hold until there's more information on how the expanded playoffs play out this season.

"We have the ability to function as an eight-game, 16-team, single-division league for the first time. We should use that learning experience," Sankey said. "We have the ability to observe the College Football Playoff selection decision-making and evaluation. We should wait to learn from that. We're going to see bowl access in this format. We'll continue to work with our media partner (ESPN). [Those are all] important information points, but none of that is [the] one single factor. That's part of the multitude. Then we get into fairness and balance. [After expansion] we took a 10-year snapshot of wins and losses and [saw] a narrow bandwidth of win-loss percentage over that time. But you get more data points every time you have a season. We now have all 16 [teams], so you're trying to compare the Oklahoma and Texas records during that time in a different league. All those are factors for consideration, which I think is part of informing the most healthy decision possible."

There's plenty of variables to including more conference games, including more difficult schedules and potentially a better television package to sell. Expansion also makes nine-game schedules more appealing from a fan perspective. One extra game means fewer years between playing conference rivals.

But the fact that Sankey still has some uncertainty highlights how difficult this time period is in college football. The SEC has generally been two steps ahead, and has the best financial performance of any conference. And even the SEC is not sure what's coming or how best to handle it. No one does.