MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. \u2014 SEC commissioner Greg Sankey left most of his answers open-ended Monday with the idea that specifics will be filled in following three days of meetings among the league\u2019s coaches, athletic directors and presidents. But Sankey answered one question definitively.<\/p>\n
Sankey was asked how committed the SEC was to its football championship game given the continuing discussion about enlarging the College Football Playoff format.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have contracts,\u201d Sankey said, \u201cSo pretty committed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked if that commitment stretched beyond the league\u2019s signed contracts with ESPN parent company Disney, Sankey dug in.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah,\u201d he said, \u201cpretty committed.\u201d<\/p>\n
No matter what Sankey says, the question of whether to continue to stage the championship game will have to be addressed if the CFP gets bigger. Whether Sankey gets his desired number (16) or whether Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti gets his desired number (24), a tournament of either size renders conference championship games in the Big Ten and SEC irrelevant at best and a punishment for the leagues\u2019 best teams at worst.<\/p>\n
But Sankey, who has worked for the league since he was hired as an associate commissioner in 2002, would prefer to take more time to think about what comes next. The SEC has held its championship game since 1992. It was the brainchild of then-commissioner Roy Kramer, who used a little-known rule created (but not initially utilized) by the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference in the late \u201980s. Bill Yoder, the former West Chester (Pa.) University AD, wrote the proposal that became the rule. \u201cWe were Division II,\u201d Yoder told me for a Sports Illustrated story in 2014. \u201cNobody really cared.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kramer saw opportunity.\u00a0 The SEC added Arkansas<\/a> and South Carolina<\/a> to get to the required 12 teams and then split into divisions. Alabama<\/a> won the first title game in a thriller against Florida<\/a> and then went on to beat Miami for the national title. The championship game became a signature event, and it\u2019s currently worth between $75 million and $100 million a year to the SEC.<\/p>\n Other leagues followed, but not immediately. The Big 12 played its first title game in 1996, then discontinued the game after 2010 and brought it back in 2017. The ACC played its first title game in 2005. The Big Ten didn\u2019t play a championship game until 2011, when Leaders Division champ Wisconsin<\/a> beat Legends Division champ Michigan State<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is a long way of saying the the other leagues don\u2019t have as much tradition baked into their title games as the SEC. Plus, the other games haven\u2019t been as financially successful*. That makes the ACC, Big 12 and Big Ten title games more easily expendable.<\/p>\n *Or as competitively successful. Texas<\/a> upset Nebraska<\/a> in the first Big 12 title game to knock the Cornhuskers out of national title contention, touching off a complicated relationship with the concept for that league. While the SEC\u2019s game usually gave its best teams a boost, it was more of a mixed bag in other conferences.<\/p>\n Despite Sankey\u2019s insistence on the league adhering to a media rights deal that runs through the 2033-34 academic year, the call has come from inside the house to reconsider playing the title game in the world of a super-sized playoff.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the ship has sailed. It\u2019s run its course,\u201d Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne told USA Today last month when asked about the SEC championship.<\/p>\n Sankey will discuss myriad issues with his stakeholders this week, but this might be the thorniest among them. And that\u2019s probably why, even after a hard line answer Monday, Sankey seemed to soften his position a few moments later.<\/p>\n \u201cEven to the question about championship games, we have time for decisions about \u2018Are we committed?\u2019 We started and nobody followed immediately, it did over time, and it set us apart,\u201d Sankey said. \u201cSo that\u2019s not something you just walk away from, because in the moment there\u2019s a little bit of pressure. You want to be thoughtful about how you do that, and I take that back to our view of the playoff.\u201d<\/p>\n The championship game isn\u2019t something the league would walk away from lightly. There probably needs to be a financial guarantee that any new revenue from the CFP could make the league whole.<\/p>\n Or perhaps there is a more creative way to reimagine that weekend. Sankey doesn\u2019t want to add a round to the CFP. A 24-team format\u2019s first round would simply take the place of championship weekend. But if the CFP went to 16 or if Sankey and Petitti can\u2019t agree and it stays at 12? Maybe there\u2019s a better way than forcing two teams who played unbalanced conference schedules (and who probably have already earned their way into the 12-team CFP) to bludgeon one another before the real tournament starts.<\/p>\n Maybe a doubleheader matching SEC teams on the bubble? Maybe a made-for-TV event matching teams from various conferences that are on the bubble?<\/p>\n Sankey is correct. Throwing out the old does no one any good without a replacement that adds value. But it\u2019s time to start coming up with those ideas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. \u2014 SEC commissioner Greg Sankey left most of his answers open-ended Monday with the idea…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":665333,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[399,398,396,397,99],"class_list":["post-665332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-football","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665332\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/665333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}