Greg Sankey said there was “discomfort” with the idea of playing a full college football schedule this coming season amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The SEC commissioner appeared on “The Paul Finebaum Show” on Thursday after the league announced a 10-game schedule for the conference only that changed the start of the season to September 26.
“There was discomfort,” he said. “Annoyances to me, annoyances from several of our programs, not universal. This is an act of bringing people together. It’s one of those moments where you and my friend Mike Slive were great at it, and I’m thankful for those learning experiences because we’ve had to come together and make some really difficult decisions. The reality is that, for the past four months, we have been in this difficult mode of decision making, really as you mentioned when I joined (the program). And I think that as we look forward, we can overcome what is happening in the public health domain.
“We need to see improvements, we need people to stay healthy. We need positive test rates to drop. We are not going to eliminate COVID, but we can address public health issues to allow our youth to educate themselves and for our young student-athletes to participate in soccer and other fall sports, it is our desire. “
Sankey was asked why the league went to conference-only games and not a plus-1 format, like the ACC a day earlier.
“People have been clamoring for us to increase the number of games in the conference, so I thought there would be a big celebration in that reality,” Sankey joked.
It was a moment of lightness in what has been a bleak experience for Sankey. In the end, he grabbed a page from the Big Ten scripts, talking about the priority of crowning a conference champion.
“But it is an acknowledgment that we are in a very different environment, and the importance of a Southeast Conference championship is paramount, for us and for my way of thinking. A lot of discussion about whether that was the right direction, ”said Sankey. “Finally, we announce that decision. We have great respect for the rivalries that exist throughout the conference, but we do not know what the fall will be like and we have the ability to manage our own schedule, we believe that it gives us the best opportunity to play for that championship, to have the winners of our division , which is our tradition, and then have a conference championship game, a few weeks after what was originally planned. “
The plan, he said, is to have break weeks built into the 10-game schedule, but it won’t be a universal break week.
“We will provide an open week within the season, which will not be a common open week,” said Sankey. “So if I get into some of the details, we’ll extend it (rest week) probably over three different weeks. So if you have an early outage, you must be lucky if you want, but you have to fit in well.
“If you have to make quick adjustments or an opportunity at the end of the day to play a game that could be displaced. And that’s an acknowledgment that we just don’t know. Therefore, we believe that it is important to plan for this right now rather than hoping for the best in this environment because we have been completely disrupted and we want to make sure that we are ready for that if it happens for any reason in our season. . “
Sankey said the next thing on the agenda is adding conference games to each team’s schedule.
“We have been running any number of models, so to speak, and thinking about how that decision can be made,” Sankey said. “Our athletic directors, earlier in the week, suggested making the first decision, so that we can then make the second decision. That second decision is exactly what the format will look like.
“I know that our colleagues at the ACC were able to launch their engagements fairly quickly, but that’s a different dynamic there. Our other two peer conferences that made announcements in early July (Big Ten and Pac-12) took a little time to make their announcements. In fact, we are still waiting.
“We just want to make sure we go through what will be a difficult decision to alter the season. Then we will finalize that format. ”
It was noted that the SEC programming format was different from the ACC format, which of course was different from the Big Ten. The chain of events may have taken many by surprise after talking about discussions between conferences.
“We are a group of conferences,” Sankey explained. “We are independent entities. We are in different regions, making informed decisions. Relationships are important. In that format, there will be differences. I think what we do is excellent, and I believe it will continue to be excellent without any other rating of any other element.
“We have stayed in communication, decisions at different points, maybe a little different decisions, but we are all trying to support, in this circumstance, the soccer game and the ability to participate in a positive way.”
Watch the full interview here.
