Get f'd, Sankey

quote:

---

DALLAS — Basking in his league’s new stomping grounds, Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey stuck with something familiar: talk of leveling the playing field.

Opening the conference’s football media days event Monday morning, Sankey tailored his talking points to the arena of legality of college athletes being paid and legislatures that now house college sports discourse.

It’s a gripe that has popped up before and is, more than a little indirectly, aimed at Missouri — the school and the state.

The name, image and likeness legislation that took effect nearly a year ago in Missouri was one of the more liberal or aggressive — depending on your perception of the new rules — bits of recent college sports policymaking. The law allows Mizzou to begin using institutional funds to compensate athletes and also allows high school recruits to earn endorsement money when they commit to in-state schools.

Sankey, citing feedback from athletes around the SEC, didn’t seem to be a fan of the perceived advantage it has given the Tigers.

“I’m actually the voice of our student-athletes,” he said, “because they have said, over and over: ‘We deserve better as student-athletes than to have a patchwork of state laws that tell us how to manage our name, imagine and likeness. We deserve better than a race to the bottom for competitive purposes on a state-by-state basis. And we as student-athletes want to know when we line up for a kickoff, tip off in a basketball game, first pitch in a softball or brball game, that the people occupying the other uniforms are governed by the same set of standards governing us.’”

Regardless of whether the matchups between state laws are so urgently on the minds of athletes when they’re seconds away from beginning a game, Sankey’s crusade against “outside ideas” of how to redeem or safeguard college sports dominated his address to SEC media.

With the arrival of Oklahoma and Texas expanding league membership to 16 schools serving as another narrative backdrop for the event taking place along the Interstate 35 corridor that delineates the SEC’s new western frontier, Sankey once again sang the praises of the conference’s competitive performances. He rattled off counts of SEC products on NBA postseason participants, MLB rosters and Olympic teams.

And he framed it in the context of what, in his eyes, is orbiting the conference.

“We’re (excelling) at a time when the pressures to recruit, to win, to draw people in are just as high as they’ve ever been,” Sankey said. “But we’ve added a set of external factors: the litigation that presses in, state-level legislation, conversations with Congress and the emergence of the next great idea that is sold or pitched as something that will quickly and fully resolve the issues currently faced in college sports.”

---