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Football season is so close that you can almost smell it, which means talking season is already here. If you are close to Atlanta, Charlotte, or Las Vegas you may even smell the garbage that the league commissioners and coaches are beginning to spew out of their mouth. SEC Media days took place last week, and there is plenty of comments to digest and discuss. The Southern Conference had their media day yesterday that Greenville Sports Media provided coverage for, while the ACC kicked their three-day event off in Charlotte, NC yesterday as well. I love that the players get the spotlight shown on them during media days, but mostly, I love reacting to intriguing tidbits of information that we gain from the league commissioners and coaches, which we will react to in this article.
We will start with SEC Media Days and commissioner Greg Sankey. He started media days off with his usual “state of the conference” speech that included him saying that college athletics is not broken. Depending on what the definition of broken is, I could agree or disagree with this statement. Broken would mean that college football is not making money and needs to be fixed which we all know is not the case. However, we all know that NIL, eligibility, and transfer portal guidelines are most certainly broken. My opinion is that NIL needs to be capped, the transfer portal needs to be limited in some regard, and college eligibility for players cannot exceed five years unless there are vast, extenuating circumstances like injuries or family matters.
Greg Sankey went on to talk about the conference going to a nine-game conference schedule. I am in complete disagreement with this schedule for several reasons. Firstly, most of the SEC teams already play at least one major non-conference opponent the next few years, if not two. The Gamecocks, for example, open with an ACC opponent and close with an ACC opponent. Tennessee plays Syracuse to open the season, Alabama plays FSU, and Kentucky plays Louisville as a rivalry game. Secondly, a ninth conference game would eliminate teams’ abilities to purchase a win from a lower-level school, which, in most cases, is a lifeline for some of these programs to get that large paycheck to support their program. In addition to that, you start risking the non-conference rivalries that mean so much to the fans and the local economies. Thirdly, the SEC schedule is strong enough as it is, but the college football playoff committee has told us that strength of schedule does not matter. So, when you start weighing out all the negatives of a nine-game conference schedule, it just does not make sense. The only reason it would make sense to go to nine conference games is if the conferences are just that greedy and want to make that much more money for themselves. However, in my mind, there is nothing you can learn from a ninth conference game that you didn’t already learn in eight.
These are just a few highlights of what I found to be intriguing comments from media days. There will be a second part to this article released soon to talk about a few other coaches’ comments as well. For more thoughts on media days, make sure to subscribe to my YouTube Channel and listen to this show.
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