One-on-one with Greg Sankey

Jeff Goodman caught up with SEC commissioner Greg Sankey at the SEC Tournament and discussed a host of topics, including the league;’s remarkable season, the future of college sports and revenue sharing, and much more.

Jeff Goodman: When everybody talks about the strength of this league, everybody goes back to obviously, back to Mike Slive. Everybody talks about the coaches, right? The resources all that, what do you have to do to sustain it?

Greg Sankey: I posted some information we shared with our president. So if you looked at 2006 through 2015, [we had] 3,3,3,4,4, [teams in]. My first year, when we had three teams in yet again, that wasn't an anomaly, that was a troubling trend.

And so in ‘15-’16 like from January to July, I went back and tried to understand why. And I think the onset of the APR, and people didn't know how to manage rosters in that new environment. A lot of coaches were good people, but it made this quick move through like Round of 32. And then they're here against really, really talented coaches like Billy [Donovan] and Kevin Stallings. Bruce [Pearl] was around then, but we didn't have stability in coaching.

And so you look at where we were, and now you look at what's happened over the last decade. We had three [teams in the NCAA Tournament] my first year. Since then we've never had fewer than six. So we've done something different in the last 10 years than we did in those 10 years, which is, I think we did not talk about the right thing.

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