SEC Media Days is back on the move, and with Commissioner Greg Sankey set to open things with his 9 a.m. press conference Monday, the questions waiting for him go well beyond the usual offseason chatter.
This year’s backdrop is Tampa, Fla., the fourth state to host the event in the last four years. That alone says plenty about how much college football keeps shifting under everyone’s feet. Sankey is walking into a week where the SEC’s biggest issues are tied to Washington, the playoff, money, and the messy reality of roster building in the NIL and transfer portal era.
One of the biggest items on the table is the Protect College Sports Act. The SEC and Big Ten have both made it clear they want major changes before they’ll support it.
The current language touches on antitrust exemption, revenue-sharing changes, and the SEC’s TV earnings, which remain the financial engine for every school in the league. Sankey and plenty of schools in the conference don’t like what they see.
The clock is part of the problem. The U.S. Senate is set to recess on Aug. 7, and while the bill can always come back later, the path through Congress gets even trickier with the midterm election calendar looming.
If Washington doesn’t move in a direction the SEC likes, there’s the other conversation that keeps hanging around: Plan B.
That idea has been floating for a while - the notion that if the league doesn’t like the federal answer, it could build its own. In plain terms, that would mean the SEC stepping away to form its own league with self-governance, its own rules, and the power to punish teams that break them.
Sankey has already said talk of an SEC and Big Ten “super league” is false, and the two conferences are not aligned on College Football Playoff expansion anyway. Still, reports about the SEC thinking about itself have continued to circulate.
Sankey is expected to be asked about it, and the likely answer is that plenty of ideas have been discussed but nothing has advanced to a final decision. For now, he appears to be waiting on Washington before making any real move.
The conference may also find itself dealing with a different kind of dispute closer to home. Ole Miss is considering suing LSU over contract buyouts tied to two players who signed revenue-sharing contracts to stay in Oxford but instead followed former Rebels coach Lane Kiffin to Baton Rouge. The split was anything but friendly, and Ole Miss is weighing legal action to recover the money those contracts say it is owed.
That situation gets even messier because Ole Miss is also being investigated for tampering with a Clemson signee, and the evidence points to its entire arm being in the cookie jar.
At the center of all of it is the same force driving college sports right now: money. Schools are trying to fund revenue share and NIL compensation while keeping athletic departments afloat, and for most schools in the country, that means balancing the books with football and men’s basketball carrying the load. In that environment, getting another school to “donate” money through a broken contract starts to look like a strategy.
The old job of a conference commissioner was to keep schools out of NCAA trouble. The new one sounds a lot more like keeping them out of a judge’s eyesight.
The playoff is another issue Sankey will almost certainly face questions about. The field was built for four teams, then expanded to 12, and somebody always wants more.
More teams means more opportunities, more games, and more TV money. But Sankey has been clear that if the bracket grows again, 16 is the ceiling - and even that may not be necessary.
Other conferences have floated 24.
His view is that the number needs to be set, automatic and guaranteed bids need to be defined, and then the whole thing needs to be left alone. There are only 134 Division I teams, and too much expansion risks turning the regular season into something that barely matters.
Then there’s the roster chaos that has become part of the sport’s daily reality. NIL and the transfer portal have made turnover a feature, not a bug.
There’s a salary cap, but it is not truly enforced. That raises the question of whether Sankey wants to do anything about it, whether that falls under some version of Plan B, and whether he believes the league can actually create a level playing field when the schools with the biggest boosters tend to build the biggest programs.
Those are the issues coming into Tampa, and they’re the ones Sankey will have to answer for as SEC Media Days gets rolling.
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