Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey said there’s no talk of a merger with the Big Ten and called the notion that the SEC wants to form a super league — the specter of which is being leveraged by lawmakers as a central threat to the future of college sports — as “not consistent with the truth.”
Sankey, in an interview Friday on “The Paul Finebaum Show,” outlined the reasons the SEC does not support a bipartisan bill introduced last week in Congress that would regulate a college sports landscape that has changed dramatically in the new era of multimillion-dollar payrolls for players.
The commissioner said there were “about one dozen big buckets” of issues the league needed to analyze in the first section of the 111-page bill. That first section does not include a proposal in a subsequent part — the rewrite of a 1961 broadcasting law that would allow conferences to pool their media rights. The SEC and Big Ten oppose that idea, which in this bill would make the pooling voluntary.
“But I really need to see that it’s voluntary to understand some components of how that would be treated under different scenarios,” Sankey said. “I think the notion that we would simply rush to say we support is not the appropriate position. I do think it’s appropriate to try to work through these issues,”
One of the bill’s sponsors, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has said the bill would prevent the two biggest conferences from forming a super league — a notion that Sankey knocked down in the interview with Finebaum and that Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti told Yahoo Sports is a “fabrication.”
In testimony this week at a Senate hearing about the bill, Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua, a former NBC executive, was asked about the super league concept. He said it would likely involve around 30 teams and could happen if the big keep getting bigger. But he also warned, “I don’t think it’s good for college football to be a mini-NFL.”
Sankey leaned into the irony of the idea that a Big Ten-SEC merger is being discussed at one level, while on another, some see a fatal flaw in the conferences’ inability to agree on some key issues in college sports — notably, how big the next expansion for the College Football Playoff should be.
“Tony and I have laughed about that particular reality, and the notion that somehow we’re going to merge our leagues and have some magical agreement,” Sankey said.
He agreed that some action is needed sooner rather than later and said he appreciated that Cruz and bill co-sponsor, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., came together to draft a bill that could eventually help guide this troubled industry.
The Big Ten and SEC Power 4 brethren, the Big 12 and Atlantic Coast conferences, have each come out in favor of the bill.
Another key supporter is Texas Tech regent Cody Campbell, a long proponent of the media-pooling idea, which he says could bring in billions more in revenue. In an interview last week with the AP, Campbell said he and lawmakers are open to discussing changes in the bill.
“I think it’s very healthy and helpful for people with outside perspectives and without personal agendas to be involved in trying to help solve this problem,” he said. “But the main thing is, look, if you created this mess, you can’t stand up and say you’re the ones who are going to fix it.”
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AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports
