MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. (KBTX) – The summer of 2020 is not a time anyone wants to mentally revisit, especially SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey.
The cancellation of the spring athletic season spawned months of uncertainty. Divisions formed between conferences as it became more evident that the business of college athletics was an every man for himself endeavor. A football season seemed improbable.
In those moments, Sankey leaned on the words of Atlanta-area pastor Andy Stanley from a podcast shared by Florida athletic director Scott Strickland.
“In times of uncertainty, what people want is clarity,” Sankey reiterated Tuesday.
Thank God we are no longer dealing with a worldwide pandemic, but the current state of college athletics is every bit as uncertain as those months in 2020. Every coach who filed into the media room at the Hilton Sandestin Resort Tuesday had clarity at the top of their offseason wish list.
As they load their luggage into rental cars over the next two days, hitting the road to the airport or back to their respective campuses, a classic from The Rolling Stones should be the first listen.
You can’t always get what you want.
The issues that plague college athletics now — rules around revenue sharing, third-party NIL deals, tampering and College Football Playoff expansion to name a few — are currently beyond the scope of just one conference. As Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko so bluntly pointed out, no one in this current moment of college sports is willing to give up an inch for the sake of the whole.
“I don’t know who is making decisions for the betterment of all,” Elko said. “I think that’s really challenging. I think you’re seeing this all over the place with every ruling that get changed, every ruling that goes to court. I don’t know. Has there ever been an industry like this in the history of the world?”
No, there isn’t. It’s what made college football one of the most fascinating sports for more than a century before this current wave of problems. However, it’s what makes it all the more challenging to untangle.
The sheer number of Football Bowl Subdivision teams eligible to compete for a national championship makes comparisons to the NFL postseason illogical. The result was over a century of using polls to determine the “best” team in the country.
For Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz, the current format of a 12-team playoff won’t always accomplish that goal — if that is truly the definition of a college football champion.
“If you put 24 teams in a playoff, or 12 teams in a playoff, I’m not sure that the best team always wins,” he said. “Matchups determine it. You can go through the NFL, the past history of the NFL, I don’t know that the best team always wins the NFL. It’s the team that gets hot. It’s the team that has the right matchup. I think it’s changed quite a bit of what we’re trying to look for.”
His answer still leaves in question what the definition of a championship program is for college football, let alone a playoff program. As expansion from 12 teams to 24 teams has gained more steam from the other three power conferences, it has become clearer that playoff programs generate the most money for media rights holders.
So, why not just make the playoff 40 teams, like Elko jokingly suggested Tuesday? Then, his Aggies should always make the playoff and his job will never be in jeopardy.
“I think the cool thing about our sport is it has always been a challenge to get into the playoffs every year,” Elko said. “There are good teams, whether it was four or whether it’s 12 — there are good football teams who don’t make it. I was in the four era at five with a really good football team that didn’t get in. Last year, there were some really good teams that didn’t get in. That’s OK. We don’t have to find a number that lets everybody get in.”
A&M athletic director Trev Alberts declined to give his opinion on expansion because he wanted to know more information on how a change would affect the regular season — namely the revenue the regular season brings the conference and his athletic department.
“You’ve seen what the dollars look like in terms of what our distribution from our media rights are,” Alberts said. “Increasingly, those media rights are a larger and larger portion of the total revenue we operate. So, anything that we do that could potentially reduce the value of the primary revenue driver in most operating budgets have to be carefully walked through.”
Despite the millions of dollars those media rights contracts bring schools in the SEC, the revenue sharing cap, which began at $20.5 million this season, could threaten the operating budgets of programs within the next few years, Elko warned. For programs outside the power conferences that reality is already here.
“I think we’re in an really interesting spot right now, because if we don’t find a way to create some level of regulation within the market, a lot of people are going to go bankrupt really quick, right?” he said.
So, how would Elko solve these problems? He would run this multi-billion dollar college football enterprise like the business it is by hiring a CEO and putting a board in place to operate with impartial judgment.
That way, rules could be enforced without coaches and athletic directors running to a court to get an injunction. The guardrails would be put back in place.
“The problem with college sports is, who’s enforcing the rules?” Elko said. “So, if there are rules that nobody’s enforcing… that just creates this waterfall of people trying to skirt things. So, I think that’s really more like, what are the rules? How are they being enforced? Are they being enforced? If so, cool. That’d be awesome. I think most of my colleagues would agree with that. I think we’re all probably skeptical of that fact that that’s possible.”
That is the problem.
None of these solutions are possible for a number of reasons that mostly point back to antitrust law, and college athletics can’t even begin that journey unless individual conferences and programs are willing to give up their self-preservation instincts for the betterment of the whole.
That is as likely as any real solutions coming out of this week’s gathering on the Florida Gulf Coast.
KBTX senior Texas A&M sportswriter Travis L. Brown can be reached at travis.brown@kbtx.com.
KBTX Senior Texas A&M Sportswriter(KBTX)
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