In picking Mike Slive’s number two man, the conference presidents have embraced “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Hell, even if it’s breaking, don’t fix it.
At the Ed O’Bannon trial last summer, Sankey was an NCAA witness called to defend college sports’ current model. The NCAA lost the case and is appealing the decision, which includes allowing football and men’s basketball players to be paid about $5,000 per year. Sankey reportedly became emotional on the stand while telling the judge a story about his baseball coach and a life lesson learned when Sankey was not in the lineup.
Sankey testified that paying athletes would have far-reaching ramifications and that the incentive for players to stay in school and graduate would be weakened if they’re paid. “It has great potential to take away from the academic core,” Sankey testified. “There’s no attachment to the education of the student like there is with a scholarship.”
Sankey described four other potential problems of paying players for use of their names, images and likenesses:
• Colleges could recruit players away from other schools
• Overzealous fans could disguise payments to athletes as being for use of their name, image or likeness
• Teams that don’t offer payments would be more hesitant to play teams that do
• The divide between college athletes and the general student body would continue to grow
Well, at least the SEC has plenty of money coming in to pay for the judgments. Besides, for the presidents, this is probably Sankey’s more important job qualification:
Sankey is currently chairman of the NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions. One of the biggest reasons the SEC won seven straight national titles in football was that it avoided major NCAA penalties that could have hurt championship contenders.
Hire a former NCAA compliance officer to help Sankey out and the conference ought to be set.
Get The Picture 
I saw the interview with him on SEC Network between the games last night. He is really, really impressed with himself.
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My thoughts exactly. “I get up at 4AM to work out, I have run eleventy billion marathons….”
What a self-absorbed clown.
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Good soldiers get rewarded.
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“which includes allowing football and men’s basketball players to be paid about $5,000 per year”
Seriously, they’re fighting that? I got paid double that to be a TA and it didn’t require nearly the same level of commitment as playing a sport does.
By the way, if we assume 85 scholarships for football and 10 for basketball, that $15M practice facility could’ve paid for all of them to receive $5K/year for the next 31 years. That doesn’t even include interest.
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Paying the players will disincentivize them to stay in school and graduate?!? If he said that with a straight face, that man has a future in politics.
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And I bet some people believed him.
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That’s the one I really don’t get. Even Manziel said he would have stayed in college longer if he’d been paid for his NLI.
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Very disappointing to not see some fresh thinking injected into the Birmingham office. This seems so similar to what we have done with the officiating positions in the SEC office when they have come open. How well has that worked out? So we get Slive’s trainee to slide one office over, use the same secretary, and not even change the type of coffee they drink. If this guy has a new idea/approach, it has already been implemented or rejected by the Presidents and ADs. Bet he thinks Steve Shaw and Redding are top notch officiating gurus and no changes need be made in upgrading the way we train or evaluate officials. Slive Light, marvelous. Trust educators to not know how to run, or improve, a business.
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You keep this up and you will be moving to the bottom of his favorites list
and before you know it he’ll soon be tired of you
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“servant leader”, now there is a term for you. Surprised Greg has to work out in a parking lot, there has to be open spaces in the UAB football weight room these days.
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I’m surprised that Greg posts pictures of Greg working out in the parking lot
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What a bummer and missed opportunity. The SEC could have hired Van Jones and all would be bliss.
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I LOL’d at the comment about the divide between college athletes and general student body continuing to grow. I mean – it’s been awhile since I’ve been in school and paying players wasn’t even at the forefront, but even little ole’ me knew those guys were damned rock stars on campus and got preferential treatment. It seems that gap wasn’t set by paying players, but by choosing to accept bundles of cash from CBS and ESPN to paste those players all over national television. However, this is a college athletics admin we’re talking about, so common sense doesn’t seem to be their forte.
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I love this sudden correlation between new TV deals, face/# plastering and pay-for-play. The next thing we’ll hear is all this SEC TV money is lining the pockets of 1%’ers.
“Hands up, don’t shoot!”, “Yes we can, “Hope & Change”, “Forward”. Blah, blah, blah…
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My sarcasm meter may be broken today, but I have no clue what point you’re trying to make.
All I’m saying is that college football players were on-campus celebrities long before pay-for-play was ever a mainstream issue because the schools and networks were the ones putting them out there on national television. I don’t have much sympathy for conference commissioners making up fake concerns that athletes are going to be seen differently by the rest of the studen body because they might get paid consider they already are seen differently by the rest of the student body because they are all over ESPN and CBS each Saturday.
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Think straw man’s and cliches and the bulb will go on.
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“Sankey is currently chairman of the NCAA Division I Committee on Infractions. One of the biggest reasons the SEC won seven straight national titles in football was that it avoided major NCAA penalties that could have hurt championship contenders.”
Can anyone write a more suggestive paragraph? Wow good old objective journalism at work.
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There’s a life lesson here. Like Auburn, Georgia needs to hire a former high-level NCAA enforcement type to insure that UGA doesn’t have any more AJ Green and Gurley problems. Georgia has been hurt more by NCAA foot-dragging and enforcement over-reaching than any other program in the SEC and quite possibly the nation.
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