re: SEC TV Ratings Fire Sankey

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Even before this immature, childish, embarrassing witch hunt he decided to go against LSU on, he has been a terrible commissioner for years, for reasons you have mentioned.

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I disagree. Which is why his last couple of years have been so disappointing and surprising. Adding 2 blue blood football programs in Texas and Oklahoma was great for the long-term benefit of the conference. (Even if he didn’t take full advantage of their addition with the tv deal). I don’t love what their additions did to the schedule, taking away some traditional annual rivalries, but he saw where college football was headed and got out in front of it.

And that’s what’s so confusing and disappointing about him lately. He was on the forefront of most things college football related. He handled COVID significantly better than any other P5 conference commissioner. He’ll, there may not have been college football in 2020 without Greg Sankey. He realized how devastating a complete season loss would be to all SEC schools athletic departments. And he was an advocate for the entire conference and each school that made it up. For a few years, he was probably the most powerful person in CFB, if not all of college athletics. That run of NC dominance from Bama to 2019 LSU to Georgia (isn’t Clemson the only school that won 1–they did win 2–from 2008-2022? That gave him a big swinging dick, and he used it. I don’t love the 12-team playoff, but he pushed for it/supported it because he knew the SEC would benefit from it by getting the most schools in it every year. We’d get home playoff games on SEC campuses.

But that is where it began to nosedive south for him. In his greed to get more SEC teams in the playoff (at the expense of the sport), he got completely played when he added that 9th SEC game, thinking the CFP would expand further to 16 or 24 teams. Without having that already contracted. His hubris got him bullied into it by the Big 10 without a deal already in place. He either thought he was more powerful than he really was and/or naively thought a “handshake deal” was binding. But that 9th game is such an egregious, unforgivable sin, that I thought he should have been fired immediately. I don’t even care that much about the recent LSU vendetta, because I can’t get over how pissed I am about that 9th game frickup. It has zero positives. Nothing but negatives:

—embarrassed him and the SEC by getting so publicly played by the B1G.

—added an extra loss to half the teams in the league, making it HARDER to get more teams in the playoffs

—took away a home game and revenue for every school every other year

—made for an unbalanced schedule where half the league has 5 SEC road games while the other half has only 4

—added another game to already ridiculously hard SEC grind, making it harder for the teams who actually make the playoffs to win when they get there

—took away a cupcake home game for every team every year, making the grind even harder. I know the fans don’t love them, but the teams need them to rest, heal, develop depth, etc…

—which was compounded by already implementing the rule that every team has to schedule at least 1 P4 game every season.

—adding the 9th game and keeping the SECCG is a huge disadvantage. With zero upside. Yeah, it’s still cool to win the SECC, but we see it in every sport now—the bigger the playoff, the less important conference championships become. Nobody cares if you win the SECC in baseball if you don’t at least get to Omaha. Nobody even knows who wins the SECC in basketball except the fans of that school. All that matters is is how far you made it in the tourney. Went 30-1 and won the SEC regular season and conference championships? Cool. Get bounced in Round 2 before the Sweet 16? Complete failure of a season.

—And the top 2 SEC football teams are walking into the playoffs every year anyway without the SECG. And the top team likely already has a bye. So playing that game doesn’t catapult them into a higher seed. It just maintains the one they’ve already got. And could potentially bounce the loser out if it gives them their 3rd loss. Bama could have easily been left out last year.

—you gave ABC and ESPN an extra 8 games. FOR FREE!!!! This is probably the worst of all. All those other disadvantages may have been worth it if he had re-negotiated the current deal. There’s no telling how much money he left on the table—and out of SEC members’ pockets—by not getting that done BEFORE going to a 9th game.

Tl;dr—I don’t care about anything else he’s ever done. Adding that 9th game was such a heinous and egregious butt-fricking of both Sankey and all the member schools of the SEC that he should have been immediately shite-canned after they realized he sold them
on it with promises or guarantees he could not deliver. His power has now been neutered. It’s why he’s so pathetically desperate to try to hang onto it. He did some good things for the conference early in his tenure, but it is in every school’s best interest that he be replaced ASAP to stop the bleeding. He is no longer respected. We are falling behind the B1G, and it is 100% his fault. But the longer we—the member schools—wait to do it, the more the fault lies with us.