I once got to meet the late Mike Slive, former commissioner of the SEC.
It was 2012, and the SEC was doing a special event in Atlanta to welcome Texas A&M and Missouri to the league. I lived in Charlotte, covered the conference for a full-SEC blog, and had no commitments that night. It was open to the public, so I went.
I only briefly got to interact with Slive as he worked the room before making a speech. I shook his hand and asked about “Project X”, which had been revealed in media reports to be the not-so-clever code name for the yet unannounced SEC Network. He gave me a big smile, might’ve winked (I can’t remember now), and told me to stay tuned on it. He was great at being this affable grandpa figure, and I got a bit of that magic firsthand.
Behind the scenes, however, Slive ruled the league with an iron fist. He had to. He took over as SEC commissioner in 2002 when the conference was in relative disarray. Too many programs were or had been recently on probation. Even Kentucky football got itself in trouble, what with Hal Mumme’s recruiting violations. This was an era when Tennessee staff told NCAA investigators about Bama paying recruit Albert Means, which eventually led to Phil Fulmer doing SEC Media Days by phone in 2004 to avoid getting a subpoena from an Alabama-based lawyer who sued over that saga.
Years later when Lane Kiffin accused Urban Meyer of recruiting violations at a signing day event, Slive acted quickly. He put out a statement blasting Kiffin for violating an SEC rule prohibiting schools from publicly criticizing each other — not a Slive creation, but still there on the books to be invoked — and explaining that Meyer had not broken a rule in that case. Kiffin had to issue a formal apology to Meyer, Jeremy Foley, and UF in general.
No one, Slive included, can stop Kiffin from running his mouth in unadvised ways, but he could swat his nose with a rolled up newspaper to nip a potential messy back-and-forth between schools in the bud.
It’s a sharp contrast to Greg Sankey. Sankey is a college sports lifer, one of the few conference commissioners who didn’t come from TV or entertainment more generally. Despite working for one of the best in Slive, he’s proven to be not as strong a commissioner.
Sankey took over 2015, and his first major test was one he failed miserably. That test was the Hurricane Matthew scheduling situation between Florida and LSU that blew up terribly and still engenders bad blood between the fan bases. What had been a great series built on grudging mutual respect went all the way to toxic in less than a week.
This week shows more weakness from Sankey. There first was the Vanity Fair profile of Kiffin which included some comments of questionable believability from Kiffin about Ole Miss being hard to recruit to due to the school’s and Oxford’s racial history compared to LSU’s and Baton Rouge’s. It was came off as him making an excuse for leaving Ole Miss for LSU, perhaps an attempt post-facto damage control given how messy his exit was. Kiffin did apologize, though it doesn’t seem to be due to pressure from Sankey.
A day later, Steve Sarkisian took a swipe at Ole Miss’s academic standing by pulling out the old chestnut about football factories putting players in basket weaving classes to keep them eligible. It’s a puzzling thing considering Texas has never had a problem with assembling more talent than Ole Miss or most other schools; getting the most out of that talent is the Longhorns’ perpetual challenge. Not to mention, the family of his prized starting quarterback might have some things to say about denigrating an Ole Miss degree.
Again, no one will ever stop Kiffin from saying inflammatory things, but Sark’s not historically a loose cannon. It’s a warning sign that he felt comfortable enough to say what he did, and that there’s been nothing but crickets from Birmingham about it. Kiffin’s comments have the defense of theoretically being something that could happen, but Sarkisian’s were plainly a swipe at a fellow member school. They violate the same rule Kiffin did back in the day, but there’s been nothing from the league about it. And even if Kiffin is uncontrollable and has plausible deniability about his statements, it still looks from the outside like two SEC members ganging up on third.
You can put whatever emphasis on these as you want, but it’s not a sign of strength from the conference. Nor is the fact that the SEC is dramatically losing the fight over the size of the College Football Playoff.
The SEC doesn’t want anything bigger than 16, because that would require killing conference championship games from a scheduling standpoint. No conference title game is a bigger event than the original, and the SEC makes enough money from it that it’s not a slam dunk that extra playoff games would make the league whole from losing it every year without fail.
Back right after the season, only the Big Ten wanted a 24-team playoff. Now, everything’s reversed and the SEC is the only one against it. The battle’s not completely over because the B1G and SEC essentially run things together and that gives Sankey half the votes that matter, but he can only hold out for so long.
Big Ten teams winning three football titles in a row has made the SEC look like it’s fallen from its perch atop college sports, but it’s a bigger problem than that. Sankey is not keeping his highest profile ambassadors in line, and he’s not winning the arguments about the future of the cash cow sport. The conference has declined, but it’s not because of Ohio State, Michigan, and Indiana. It’s because of Sankey not being near as strong a leader as Slive was, as he’s failing both to keep his house in order and convince anyone else that his vision of the future is the right one.