Greg Sankey discusses SEC single-division format
The Southeastern Conference media days kicked off Monday at the College Football Hall of Fame and The Omni Atlanta Hotel at CNN Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
“As you know, when we go through this change, we are considering how to schedule — but our football scheduling model is still under consideration,” Sankey announced.
Sankey mentioned there were “deep and productive conversations” about future SEC scheduling at the spring meetings in Destin, Florida last month.
“Those conversations actually began back at our meetings in August,” he said. “When we concluded our discussion in Destin, we had a focus placed on a single division model, with the ability to accommodate either an eight-game or nine-game conference schedule.
“We ended with the understanding that more questions needed to be answered including the general timeline and the issues that need to be addressed as we think forward now about the College Football Playoff. We have to dig through a tie-breaking procedure. We have over a quarter century in divisions and we understand all the nuances about how to break ties. We have to dig a bit deeper there with the single division concept in front of us. We want to understand the impact through the use of analytics on bowl eligibility for our teams who are growing their programs, and College Football Playoff access dependent on the number of teams that might be included. There are a range of possibilities being considered. We have time to make a decision. As you’ve seen before with us, particularly in the last few years, as we dealt with some difficult issues, we’re going to use that time to inform our decision-making and not be subject to an arbitrary deadline.”
