TAMPA — SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey normally kicks off SEC Media Days with a positive assessment of the conference. That wasn’t entirely the case Monday.

While Sankey did talk about the how the SEC remains the second most-watched sports property in the nation, trailing only the NFL, he spent a great deal of time on the conference’s opposition to the U.S. Senate’s Protect College Sports Act and the perceived lack of effort by the NCAA to standardize NIL rules across the board.

When asked if there had been real discussions about the possibility of the SEC breaking away from the NCAA if the status quo remains in place, Sankey was upfront.

“So you phrase the question of how real. So I’ll take that as like real or not real. So they’re real,” he said. “People have talked about that. They’ve opined about the frustrations that bring them to the point of saying we should look at something significantly different. I do not think that’s a leverage point, I think that’s honest conversation.”

The SEC and the Big 10 have both come out against the Protect College Sports Act, and Sankey expressed his displeasure with other conferences and the NCAA for the inability to create movement on critical issues.

“What I think is important is those comments (on breaking away) represent a high level of frustration with the circumstance in which we find ourselves,” he said. “We have regulated ourselves more progressively than other colleagues by choice, across our league. We’ve had different academic eligibility restrictions in the past. So we have different transfer restrictions in the past. Some of what you hear comes out of a culture that we can regulate ourselves.”

Sankey said the conference had made a number of “achievable and
reasonable” adjustments to the legislation — 10 commonsense centered on four things: the need for enforceable national standards; a framework which is “truly national” and supersede the variety of state laws currently in place; an effective and enforceable framework for NIL deals. The fourth requires identical punishments for identical offenses.

Sankey said that, without those adjustments, the Protect College Sports Act wlll not be supported by the SEC.

“(Acceptance of the bill) requires meaningful transparency so everyone operates under the same expectations and the same level of accountability,” he said. “We support the effort behind the Protect College Sports Act; however, we believe changes to the act are necessary to make it most effective.”

One major change to the SEC begins this fall as teams starting playing an nine-team conference schedule. The addition of that additional game, Sankey said, ensures that SEC teams will play the toughest schedules in the nation.

“We … recognize that a nine-game Southeastern Conference football schedule, coupled with our expectation that we maintain a high-quality non-conference opponent … It creates, without question, the most demanding sets of football schedules in all of college football.” he said. “These decisions were made after years of thoughtful discussion, careful analysis, and spirited debate, which led us to the conclusion that the nine-game schedule was appropriate.

While SEC teams will surely use the ninth game as a selling point for the CFP selection committee, Sankey expressed doubt that the an expansion to 12 or 24 playoff teams will happen anytime soon as the CFP and the major conferences have differing opinions on enlarging the playoff. The conferences themselves also have differing views, as the SEC remains the lone holdout against a 24-team playoff.

“We had what I’ll call an unsatisfactory conversation with members of the College Football Playoff staff and some of their advisers in Destin. That’s rehashing from a couple months ago, that’s not a secret,” he said. That’s a reminder of that process needing to continually improve. My confidence is that people will act with integrity. I do think we have questions about the understanding of the strength and rigor associated with competing in the Southeastern Conference.”