Hey SEC! STOP IT! This is about One Game. One Country. One College Football.
SEC Media Days opened with talk of breaking away from the NCAA. That's not the solution. The real problem is that college sports has lost sight of its purpose.
Presented by AR’s Hot Honey
I wasn’t in Tampa for SEC Media Days this year.
That’s okay. SiriusXM can’t send everyone to every event, and I’ve been fortunate enough to cover more than my share over the years. But as I watched Greg Sankey open SEC Media Days from home, I found myself wishing I had been in that room.
Because I have questions. Lots of them.
For years, Sankey has projected confidence. He’s never been flashy, but he has always seemed measured, deliberate and in complete command of the moment.
Monday felt different.
There was a heaviness to him.
Part of that is understandable. College sports has become less about football and more about lawsuits, congressional hearings, federal legislation and governance. A significant portion of Sankey’s opening remarks focused not on touchdowns or championships, but on the Protect College Sports Act and why the SEC believes Congress needs to step in and create a workable national framework. That’s the world college athletics now lives in.
Then came the question.
Are the reports about the SEC discussing breaking away from the NCAA real?
Sankey’s answer was simple.
Yes.
“They’re real.”
He went on to explain that those conversations are born out of frustration, not leverage. He said conference leaders have genuinely discussed whether they need to look at “something significantly different” because the current system isn’t functioning the way they believe it should. He also emphasized that he still sees value in having a national governing structure—provided it actually works.
I believe him.
I believe those conversations are happening.
I also think it would be one of the biggest mistakes college athletics has ever made.
Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should
The SEC has power. The Big Ten has power. They have the television money. They have the biggest brands. They have enormous influence in Washington. Nobody disputes that.
But somewhere along the way, we’ve started confusing having power with being right. College football wasn’t created to maximize quarterly television revenue. It wasn’t designed to create billion-dollar media companies or make commissioners into CEOs of multinational corporations.
It exists because universities believed athletics could help educate young people. That mission has gotten buried beneath television contracts, streaming deals and an endless chase for the next dollar.
We Didn’t Have to End Up Here
People love to act like today’s chaos was inevitable. It wasn’t. Athletes absolutely deserved more. As television money exploded, scholarship benefits should have expanded with it. Cost-of-attendance.
Health care. Lifetime educational opportunities. Revenue sharing. All of this could have been avoided. The power leagues would likely blame the smaller leagues for voting against it, because they can't afford it.
That in itself brings up a whole different discussion about membership structure and voting rights.
However, there were countless opportunities for the NCAA membership to modernize before the Supreme Court’s Alston decision exposed just how broken the old amateurism model had become. Instead, the people running college athletics dug in.
University presidents failed. Conference commissioners failed. The NCAA failed. The system refused to evolve until the courts forced it to.
That’s how we got here.
