Greg Sankey was among those who travelled to Washington D.C. to attend president Donald Trump’s roundtable at the White House on Friday. Sankey was in attendance, but revealed that he didn’t anticipate the event to be broadcast live for everyone to see.
“I was aware the meeting was going to be public. I was not aware it was going to be broadcast live,” Sankey revealed during an appearance on the Paul Finebaum Show Monday. “So, I turned my phone off. You obviously want to be fully focused on that kind of meeting. When I turned my phone on, I realized, based on the number text messages sent to me, that some broadcast outlet had the live feed.”
The SEC commissioner wants to put these issues front and center for all fans to see. He even suggested airing it live on his conference’s broadcast network: “If there’s ever a reconvening,” Sankey said, “we’ll see if that can be on the SEC Network.”
It should be noted that there hasn’t been anything that has come out to suggest there will be another. For now, the biggest takeaway is the president is planning to sign an executive order that he says will be “more comprehensive” than the one he signed in July even though he expects it to be challenged in court. Trump said, “I’d like to go exactly back to what we had and ram it through a court.“
He plans to sign the executive order because of the “disaster” he believes NIL and revenue sharing is for college athletics. Trump said it’s “ruining families, ruining everything,” so he’ll hope the order is seen by someone “who’s a real judge, a compassionate judge and a judge with common sense (who) will get it approved.”
Whether the president goes through with the executive order, or if there’s another roundtable to be aired remains to be seen. What’s clear is that everyone representing college athletics at the White House last week have respective issues they want ironed out.
Sankey said during the Finebaum Show that many of the issues he wanted to target had already been brought up by his colleagues during the roundtable. The SEC commissioner recently said that he is in favor of having national standards in NIL.
“The young people on the court, when we meet with them, they ask one thing,” Sankey said. “I want to know when I line up for tip-off, that the people in the other uniform are held to the same standards and the same set of policies that I’m held to.’”