Greg Sankey has a big brain and a wonk’s zeal for esoteric and complicated issues. Few people in college athletics are more at home amid the weeds of NCAA bylaws and policy, which is a big reason why he’s been the co-chair of the association’s massive undertaking to remake itself over the past year. When the work gets dense and administrators’ eyes glaze over, Sankey’s light up.
The commissioner of the Southeastern Conference projects an Ivy League intellect and a patrician air. But Sankey’s path to becoming the most powerful figure in college sports winds through neither a privileged upbringing nor an elite education. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Yankee accent aside, he’s got more in common with rank-and-file SEC fans than anyone might have guessed. The son of a welder spent some of his formative years living in a mobile home in upstate New York near Skaneateles Lake (“Long Lake” in one of the local Iroquois languages). One summer, the Sankey family lived in a garage that lacked air conditioning.
The Finger Lakes region outside Syracuse is a resort area for many affluent New Yorkers, but the everyday reality of living there was nothing glamorous for Sankey. Andy Lyons/Getty Images He was the first member of his family to go to college. His education meandered through an obscure NAIA school in Texas, a New York junior college, SUNY Cortland (where he earned an undergraduate degree in education) and Syracuse (master’s degree in education).
He was a backup catcher at LeTourneau in Longview, Texas, then played basketball at Cayuga Community College. From there, Sankey authored a prodigious rise through the college sports ranks. He’s evolved from intramural director to golf coach to campus compliance director to low-major conference commissioner to Mike Slive’s right-hand man to replacing Slive.
Known to never raise his voice, he’s brought a measured calm to a conference that is anything but. In his current role, he has carried on the twin legacies of recent SEC commissioners: continuing conference expansion and altering the football postseason . As the Power 5 leadership ranks have turned over and the NCAA’s central authority has waned, he’s become the most authoritative person in the industry.
Greg Sankey, now 58, has driven himself a long way. A lifetime of decisions, some of them difficult, led him away from upstate New York and culminated in commissionership of the most successful athletic conference in the nation. Since then, he has evolved into the most powerful person in his line of work, at a moment of acute fragility within the enterprise.
But as his league swells in numbers, lines its coffers with cash and helps destabilize the national landscape, it’s fair to ask: Is the smartest guy in every room and on every committee now piloting college sports along the best path, or the road to ruin? The almost willful blandness Greg Sankey brings to a podium cloaks an intensity that simmers within. Former Mississippi chancellor Daniel Jones once described Sankey as “anti-charismatic” to The New York Times . “That hurt my feelings,” the commissioner jokes—but it fits.
To a point. Sankey can be boring on the outside but burning with ambition and competitiveness on the inside. In that way, an intellectual upstate New Yorker is a perfect fit with the fiercest conference in college sports.
He was a two-sport college athlete, albeit at two different schools. The journey away from a mobile-home upbringing began by going to play baseball in Texas, drawn by the engineering program and religious affiliation at LeTourneau. “I was looking for adventure,” he says.
“An opportunity to spread my wings. ” While Sankey (left) played basketball at Cayuga Community College, he further deepened his interest in coaching. Courtesy of SEC Communications What he encountered was an engineering class at 4 p.
m. on Fridays, which brought home the realization that he really wasn’t into engineering. He had been pointed in that direction by his father, Jerry, and upon returning home that summer the conversation was unpleasant when Sankey told him he was changing majors and schools.
“I was in the garage at our house,” Sankey says. “I told him, ‘I’m going to change my major; I want to be a teacher and a coach. ’ He never said no, to his credit.
The quote I recall was, ‘You’re missing the boat. ’” Some 15 years later, Sankey brought his dad and brother Bill to the 1998 Final Four as his guests. His father told him then that his decision to leave engineering had worked out pretty well.
That change led him back home to Cayuga Community College, where he was a hard-nosed sub for coach Jim Sigona, who was then just 23 years old. Sigona, now in his 35th year at Collin College in Texas, remains in contact with Sankey. “He was an energy guy, a defender, who took a charge,” Sigona says.
“He played hard and knew his role. He always had a great demeanor, whether he played five minutes or 20. ” Sankey’s first attraction to college athletics was reading John Wooden’s book, They Call Me Coach , which he won in a clean-desk competition at school at age 11.
From that point forward, he was drawn to coaches and coaching. That was also the case at Cayuga, where he studied Sigona and his staff. “He always wanted to sit by the coaches,” Sigona says.
“He was always trying to listen to what we were saying. He was a great listener. ” After getting his undergrad degree at SUNY Cortland and going to grad school at Syracuse while simultaneously running the intramural program at then-Utica College, Sankey was perusing the classified ads in the weekly NCAA News looking for his next opportunity.
He applied to several of them and received interest for an internship at Northwestern State in Natchitoches, La. He paid for his own plane ticket to get to the interview and was offered the job. That led to a full-time job as the athletic department’s compliance director, tasked with keeping the Demons on the right side of the NCAA rules manual.
And when the school parted ways with the coach of its woeful men’s golf team, Sankey volunteered for that gig, as well. He wasn’t a good golfer and knew very little about how to coach it. But he dived into the job, trying to build up the worst program in the Southland Conference.
He gave every player a binder, asking them to chart every hole of every practice round. He went through all the binders and supplied feedback. “He was determined,” says Scott Bergeron, Sankey’s first recruit.
“He wanted to make the most out of a little golf team in Natchitoches, Louisiana. ” It wasn’t easy. The team had little in the way of equipment and had to drive an hour just to play an 18-hole course.
Then, there were the uniforms. Northwestern State’s colors are purple and orange. Bergeron recalls the uniforms that were ordered coming in late, just before a trip to their first match.
When they opened the boxes, they found lime-green shirts, white slacks and blue windbreakers. “He was just devastated,” Bergeron says. The mode of transport was as bad as the uniforms, either piling in cars or sometimes getting the one of the athletic department’s two vans that was in a state of disrepair.
Sankey recalls one trip from hell, when Northwestern State was headed from Natchitoches (pronounced “Naka-dish”) to Waco. They were in the van, on Louisiana Highway 6, and stopped for gas before dawn in the town of Many, La. Sankey somehow got locked in the convenience store while the rest of the team was outside, and the store employee was nowhere to be found.
Later, when Coach and Team were back on the road, one of the players in the back told Sankey that they could see the road. “Well, yeah,” Sankey replied. “No, Coach,” the player said.
“I can see the road through the floor of the van. ” Somehow, Northwestern State golf took a leap forward on Sankey’s watch. The Demons finished second in the Southland Conference in his final season, and Sankey won Coach of the Year honors.
Shortly thereafter, he left the school to join the Southland as an assistant commissioner—but he still kept an eye on his former players. Bergeron recalls the final hole of his final college tournament, the Southland championship. He came off the 18th green, and Sankey was standing there with his parents, ready to give him a hug.
“He’s a leader of men,” Bergeron says. “He cared about us. If my mom texts Greg right now, he’d return it right away.
” Sankey and his wife, Cathy, were married in 1988. Courtesy of SEC Communications With a brain wired more for administration than coaching, Sankey’s career path was set when he went to the Southland. Within four years, he was named commissioner of the league while in his early 30s.
And he soon began running himself ragged. Sankey was on his way to SEC headquarters for the first time in 1997, for a meeting in his role at the Southland. He never made it.
While changing planes in Atlanta, Sankey went into the bathroom and passed out cold. Racing through life on minimal sleep, questionable diet and maximum caffeine, he had a “heart episode,” as he put it. “When you’re waking up on the bathroom floor, you’re not in a good spot,” he says dryly.
“After that, I went through about six months where I’d sit with people and ask how you balance life. I took notes. ” Of course he took notes.
And made changes. Sankey became an avid runner (he’s logged more than 40 marathons) and leaned into what he calls “leading a quiet life. ” That includes more focus on family (he and his wife, Cathy, have two daughters; Hannah is a TV meteorologist and Moriah a teacher).
But leading a quiet life doesn’t preclude having ambition. And when the SEC asked him to come aboard as an assistant commissioner, he jumped at it. In late 2014, Mike Slive announced his retirement as SEC commissioner, effective in ’15.
A man who combined jovial people skills with brass-knuckles effectiveness behind closed doors, Slive was leaving massive shoes to fill. Greg Sankey wanted the job, and many in the league wanted him to get it, but being the nuts-and-bolts guy in Slive’s shadow left him with a fairly obscure public persona. Nevertheless, Sankey got enough backing to land an interview with the SEC committee appointed to pick a new commissioner at the Vanderbilt chancellor’s residence in Nashville in 2015.
Thoroughly prepared as always, he thought he aced the interview—telling them, among other things, that more expansion was inevitable in college sports, and the SEC had to be ready for it. The expectation was a quick resolution—Sankey could be told he had the job that very day, shortly after the interview. But time lagged for a while without any word, and Sankey began to get a sinking feeling that he wasn’t getting the promotion.
He figured he had to leave the league and go find another job—but first he had to go make a presentation to the SEC presidents covering some league business. “I started to go into a spiral,” he says. “You decide in those moments who you are.
I had a job to do; I had some information to provide. I remember vividly grabbing my briefcase, straightening my tie and walking up the steps toward the door [to the meeting]. “One president stopped me and said, ‘Come with me.
’ He took me into a room, sat me on the couch and said, ‘Congratulations. ’ And the world just started spinning. Fast.
” Later that night, Sankey hugged Cathy and told her, “It worked. ” “What worked?” she asked. “All of it,” he said.
Sankey helped the SEC increase its revenue by $105 million in 2021 and reach a total of $833 million. Dale Zanine/USA TODAY Sports Can football be too big? Can it swallow everything else? Can the urge for more money and power turn America’s favorite sport into a destructive force for all other sports? Sankey approaches the question the way he approaches most questions—mulling it, contemplating his answer, then phrasing it carefully. He’s sitting in a conference room at SEC headquarters in downtown Birmingham, temporarily relocating his workspace there during this summer while parts of the building are being renovated.
“I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that,” he says in his deep, monotone voice. “We want it to be special and unique, and it is. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved in football.
“Can it be [too big]? You’d be a fool to say no; you’d be a fool to say yes. ” For three decades, the SEC has been at the forefront of the college football arms race. In a bigger-is-better society, no one has worked more relentlessly than the SEC to enlarge the sport’s place in it.
Roy Kramer was the commissioner in the 1990s when the league added Arkansas and South Carolina and became the first conference to split into divisions and hold a championship game. Slive was next, adding Texas A&M and Missouri in 2012 and also serving as the driving force to establish a four-team playoff. Now it’s Sankey’s turn to be an agent of change and a champion of King Football.
In 2020, he set a prudent, patient but persistent course for playing sports amid the COVID-19 pandemic. If you poll college leaders about who was most important in saving the ’20 college football season, Sankey would be the landslide winner. “It was incredibly uncomfortable,” Sankey says.
“It sucked, but I’m glad we did it. ” Then came Manifest Destiny. In 2021, he facilitated the upcoming SEC expansion to 16 teams, adding Texas and Oklahoma for arrival in ’25.
(Or maybe ’24—stay tuned. ) That news shocked the sport—no one more than then Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, who had been working closely with Sankey and others on the plan to expand the College Football Playoff. It was devastating news to him.
“I don’t think there’s any way to put a good face on being in the same room together for months on end and not being able to be forthright about what was going on,” Bowlsby says. “And yet, I understand why that wasn’t practical—I probably would have tried to get them to stay. I have to admit some deep disappointment that he and I didn’t have an earlier conversation.
I feel the same way regarding the two athletic directors [at Texas and Oklahoma]. If you don’t have trust, it’s hard to have a friendship. ” He is one of the architects of a 12-team College Football Playoff model that encountered infuriating resistance for a year but now, as of last week, is on its way to becoming reality.
And, last month, he told Sports Illustrated he is open to the possibility of expanding the NCAA basketball tournaments —an idea that may go beyond pushing the envelope, to actually tearing it. The SEC’s additions of Texas and Oklahoma nearly crippled the Big 12, which lost i
