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KBTX Senior Texas A&M Sportswriter(KBTX)<\/p>\nMIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. (KBTX) – The summer of 2020 is not a time anyone wants to mentally revisit, especially SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In those moments, Sankey leaned on the words of Atlanta-area pastor Andy Stanley from a podcast shared by Florida athletic director Scott Strickland.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn times of uncertainty, what people want is clarity,\u201d Sankey reiterated Tuesday.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t always get what you want.<\/p>\n
The issues that plague college athletics now \u2014 rules around revenue sharing, third-party NIL deals, tampering and College Football Playoff expansion to name a few \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know who is making decisions for the betterment of all,\u201d Elko said. \u201cI think that\u2019s really challenging. I think you\u2019re seeing this all over the place with every ruling that get changed, every ruling that goes to court. I don\u2019t know. Has there ever been an industry like this in the history of the world?\u201d<\/p>\n
No, there isn\u2019t. It\u2019s what made college football one of the most fascinating sports for more than a century before this current wave of problems. However, it\u2019s what makes it all the more challenging to untangle.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cbest\u201d team in the country.<\/p>\n
For Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz, the current format of a 12-team playoff won\u2019t always accomplish that goal \u2014 if that is truly the definition of a college football champion.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you put 24 teams in a playoff, or 12 teams in a playoff, I\u2019m not sure that the best team always wins,\u201d he said. \u201cMatchups determine it. You can go through the NFL, the past history of the NFL, I don\u2019t know that the best team always wins the NFL. It\u2019s the team that gets hot. It\u2019s the team that has the right matchup. I think it\u2019s changed quite a bit of what we\u2019re trying to look for.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the cool thing about our sport is it has always been a challenge to get into the playoffs every year,\u201d Elko said. \u201cThere are good teams, whether it was four or whether it\u2019s 12 \u2014 there are good football teams who don\u2019t make it. I was in the four era at five with a really good football team that didn\u2019t get in. Last year, there were some really good teams that didn\u2019t get in. That\u2019s OK. We don\u2019t have to find a number that lets everybody get in.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 namely the revenue the regular season brings the conference and his athletic department.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve seen what the dollars look like in terms of what our distribution from our media rights are,\u201d Alberts said. \u201cIncreasingly, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we\u2019re in an really interesting spot right now, because if we don\u2019t find a way to create some level of regulation within the market, a lot of people are going to go bankrupt really quick, right?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe problem with college sports is, who\u2019s enforcing the rules?\u201d Elko said. \u201cSo, if there are rules that nobody\u2019s enforcing\u2026 that just creates this waterfall of people trying to skirt things. So, I think that\u2019s really more like, what are the rules? How are they being enforced? Are they being enforced? If so, cool. That\u2019d be awesome. I think most of my colleagues would agree with that. I think we\u2019re all probably skeptical of that fact that that\u2019s possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
That is the problem.<\/p>\n
None of these solutions are possible for a number of reasons that mostly point back to antitrust law, and college athletics can\u2019t even begin that journey unless individual conferences and programs are willing to give up their self-preservation instincts for the betterment of the whole.<\/p>\n
That is as likely as any real solutions coming out of this week\u2019s gathering on the Florida Gulf Coast.<\/p>\n
KBTX senior Texas A&M sportswriter Travis L. Brown can be reached at travis.brown@kbtx.com.<\/p>\n
KBTX Senior Texas A&M Sportswriter(KBTX)<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 KBTX. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. (KBTX) – The summer of 2020 is not a time anyone wants to mentally revisit,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":902428,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[7,8518,49,48,121031,1687],"class_list":["post-902427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-football","tag-mike-elko","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-sec-spring-meetings","tag-texas-am"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116645431101527442","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=902427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902427\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/902428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=902427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=902427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=902427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}