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Greg Sankey is doing his job. It's just that sometimes, doing that job leads to him saying things that simply aren't true.
On Monday night, while most of the country was dealing with heartburn and indigestion after celebrating the unofficial start of summer in the United States, Sankey was in Florida speaking to the media ahead of this week's SEC Spring Meetings. It's there that Sankey will listen to the heads of the 16 schools he's commissioner of and set a course for what's best for the SEC. That's his job, and he's damn good at it.
Of considerable concern for the league at the moment is shaping the future of the sport through the College Football Playoff. While the 2025 version will remain at 12 teams with (thankfully) restructured seeding, expansion is inevitable. Whether it will be 14 or 16 teams is unclear, as is the format that will decide who occupies those 14 to 16 slots.
Rest assured, Sankey will do everything he can to make sure the SEC is well-represented. He made that clear while speaking to reporters. While Sankey said many logical and interesting things, one quote stood out and caused my eyelid to twitch.
"It's clear that not losing becomes in many ways more important than beating the University of Georgia, which two of our teams that were left out did," he said in reference to the belief that strength of schedule was not taken into consideration when choosing last year's playoff field. That's why three three-loss SEC teams, Alabama, Ole Miss, and South Carolina, were left out for programs simply unworthy of being considered great, like Indiana and SMU.
Since I respect your time and my dwindling sanity, I will not write 2,500 words on the idea that losing shouldn't matter in competition. Here I thought winning and losing was the soul of sport!
Anyway, Sankey is not incorrect in the sense that strength of schedule should matter, which is his greater point. It definitely should. Where he's off-base is that it did matter. It just didn't matter more than winning games, or, more pertinent to the cases of Alabama and Ole Miss, not losing to mediocre teams.
While Sankey is happy to mention Alabama and Ole Miss beat Georgia, for some reason he left out that two of Alabama's three regular season losses came to Vanderbilt and Oklahoma. Those two went a combined 3-11 in SEC games not against Alabama. Then there's Ole Miss, which also beat Georgia, but do you remember what it did in its next game?
It lost to Florida, but that's not overly embarrassing. The Gators did finish 8-5 and went 3-4 in SEC games not against Ole Miss. No, what's embarrassing was Ole Miss' 20-17 loss at home to Kentucky. It was Kentucky's only SEC win of the year. Its other seven games were all losses and by an average of 14.6 points at that.
As for South Carolina, they were a noble squad. They played the toughest nonconference game of the SEC's neglected trio, beating Clemson on the road. They suffered no bad losses, but they did lose to Alabama and Ole Miss, which made putting them ahead of either and into the playoff quite a tricky proposition.
Whoever you like most between Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina, remember an at-large spot was squeezed out after Clemson won the ACC, thus qualifying for the CFP when it was otherwise not going to.
Another part Sankey fails to mention when discussing that "not losing" (sometimes referred to as "winning") seems more important, is that Alabama finished ranked ahead of a two-loss Big 12 champion, as well as a two-loss Miami team. Why? Because of that strength of schedule metric the committee allegedly doesn't use.
Strength of schedule was also why an 11-1 Indiana team finished behind a 10-2 Tennessee, as well as four other two-loss teams. It's why the Hoosiers had to play Notre Dame on the road in the first round.
It's also why Boise State was ranked behind Indiana, and Boise State and Arizona State being ranked No. 9 and No. 12 respectively due to their SOS, but getting a bye anyway is exactly why we all decided to get rid of the automatic byes for conference champions.
Sankey and the SEC can push the idea strength of schedule was ignored by the committee, but there's no truth to it. At the end of the day, Alabama and Ole Miss were left out because they lost to four SEC teams that went a combined 6-22 against everybody else in the SEC. South Carolina missed out because head-to-head matters, too.
I hope that's clear enough for you, Mr. Commissioner.
