SOMEWHERE OVER TEXAS — Greg Sankey’s blue plaid sports coat is speckled with the white remnants of a funnel cake, and his brown slacks are blemished by a dollop of barbecue sauce.

 

These are consequences of his most recent trip to one of the country’s most celebrated American festivals: the State Fair of Texas. All he needs now is a cowboy hat, alligator-skinned boots, cowhide jeans and a snuff-stuffed lip to complete the transition from rural New Yorker to God-fearing Southerner to, finally, born-again Texan.

 

Good luck convincing this man to do any of the above.

 

There will be no hat for him.

 

Boots? Please.

 

He’s interested in only dark jeans, and he’ll turn back tobacco as quickly as it is offered.

Even as the most powerful figure in college football, Gregory Sankey, 59, is a modest man, plain, simple and somewhat uninteresting. In fact, on a crisp October day in which he’ll criss-cross the state of Texas, witness two top-25 college football games, see thousands of fans, gladhand with powerful school presidents and mill about with media members, Sankey’s attire is something that would leave Dwight Schrute envious — brown and whites mostly, with a speck of blue.

 

He doesn’t seem to belong here, flying over the Texas plains in a winged luxury plane. He is quite uncomfortable in such a tight space, physically as a large man — broad shoulders and long legs — and figuratively as a commissioner whose member schools are geographically close enough that he most frequently commutes by car (he’s already attended 10 games this season, driving or flying commercial to six of them).

This, though, is a unique situation in which he’s attending two overlapping games 180 miles apart, one in Dallas and another in College Station, wedged between a friend’s wedding festivities on Friday and Saturday evenings in Austin, Texas.

 

On this 12-hour jaunt, Sankey cuts a 500-mile V-shaped path across the Texas sky — Austin to Dallas to College Station to Austin — some 20,000 feet above his newest, and richest, territory. From the home of the Longhorns to the den of the Aggies, the sitting SEC commissioner witnesses a Big 12 conference game — an oddity, to be sure — between his impending new members, Texas and Oklahoma, before gazing down from the president’s suite at Kyle Field as the league’s historic powerhouse, Alabama, storms backs to beat the conference’s 10-year-old resource goliath, Texas A&M.

He witnesses passion, pageantry and his people, roaring and chanting, cursing and drinking, yelling and screaming.

 

The man responsible, some say, for protecting and preserving this madness amid looming external pressures stands at an impasse.

 

How do you further modernize college athletics, acquiescing to understandable demands over the industry’s money-making giant (football) while preserving the uniqueness of Olympic-style college sports? And can you do it before others — federal judges, state lawmakers and plaintiff lawyers — do it for you?

 

“That question,” Sankey says, “is as important as any right now.”

 

“People say college athletics has been slow to adapt. Well, yes, but it has adapted,” he continues. “I’ll accept the finger pointed at us in college athletics, but that finger points back at society. Not everything should change quickly.”

 

In a dark suit, black tie, white-collar shirt and mirrored sun shades, Ramirez protects and chauffeurs Greg Sankey throughout the Cotton Bowl — a guide for the commissioner’s first-ever foray into the 119-game series between the two bitter rivals played at a historic 93-year-old venue.

Earlier in the week, news of Sankey’s planned trip here caused a stir, one more significant than he ever imagined. Why is it such a big deal?

 

The Big 12’s own commissioner, Brett Yormark, wondered the same. The two discussed the matter while in Chicago at commissioner meetings two weeks ago. It’s understandable for Sankey to attend the game, Yormark told Yahoo Sports, because “it’s his future.”

 

In fact, Yormark is scheduled to visit Boulder, Colorado, this weekend to see his future team, the Buffaloes, meet Stanford in a Pac-12 game, sources tell Yahoo Sports.

 

Is all of this weird? Yes. But these are strange times in college athletics, where the shifting titanic plates of realignment left one power league in collapse and saw four others swell: The ACC and Big Ten are now at 18 members and the SEC and Big 12 at 16.

 

On the outskirts of the Cotton Bowl, with Ramirez leading the way, Sankey enters the bowels of this old beast, leaving the aromas of the State Fair behind — the fumes of cow manure and the fragrance of funnel cakes.

His time here is a bizarre scene fitting of the industry’s current predicament — a commissioner of another league heralded, praised and thanked from each of the sparring fan bases as he parades across a football-crazed sea of humanity.

Sankey chooses not the quiet tunnels or hidden backways. He is a man of the people, after all. When Ramirez suggests the more tame corridors and not the busy concourse, Sankey interrupts, “The concourse! I want to see what this is all about.”

 

He weaves around packed concession lines. He strides up the concrete stairs like a brown-and-blue vessel parting a crimson and burnt orange sea. He laps the field in front of students, rides the elevators with suite-goers and poses for pictures with beer-guzzling fans.

 

“You’ve got your hands full,” he remarks to a Texas fan wielding two Michelob Ultra bottles while snapping a selfie with the commissioner.

 

Wherever he goes, whispers of his appearance spread.

 

“That’s the SEC commissioner!”

 

“The commissioner, here?”

 

“Yes, that’s him.”

 

Many don’t know his name. Some do.

 

“Mr. Sankey! A picture?” one yells before he wheels around to pose.

 

“Thanks for inviting us in!” an OU fan bellows from a crimson-clad crowd.

 

“We’re glad you are here!” a Texas fan yelps.

 

“This is SEC country!” a woman, decked in burnt orange, shouts from the concourse.

And then, just minutes before kickoff, as he strides in front of the Oklahoma student section, a young man recognizes the boss of the SEC. He tells his buddies and they tell their buddies and before you know it, the section roars with a now-iconic chant.

 

“S-E-C! S-E-C! S-E-C!”

 

This place feels like the SEC, doesn’t it?

They deep fry everything. They love football. They are polite — “Yes, ma'am,” “Yes, sir.”

 

The SEC, as the slogan purports, just means more. Texas, as the people say, means bigger.

 

But Sankey isn’t so different from people here within the Cotton Bowl and those across the Southeast footprint.

 

Sure, this bespectacled man reads as many as 70 books a year, is a health-conscious marathon runner, a proficient note-taker and, as mentioned, a subdued dresser. He’s quietly bold and humbly proud, careful with his language and thoughtful with his actions.

 

That’s not so Texan.

 

The truth is, he’s more blue-collar than his scholarly image portrays — the son and grandson of rural Northeastern welders, the product of a New York junior college whose family lived in mobile home parks until he was 5.

 

His climb to this lofty place has a winding backstory. He once worked building construction, spent time on a pig farm, pumped fuel as a gas station attendant and even served as a trash collector.

College-aged Greg was responsible for tossing the neighbor’s garbage into the bed of his father-in-law Ed’s pickup truck. “I still smell the cigarette smoke he smoked in the cab,” Sankey says through a smile, the words of a man who is seldom around such vices.

 

Sankey did not drink alcohol until he was deep into his adult life, scarred from a family that battled alcoholism for years. He’s guarded about the topic. Around age 5, things changed for the better when a town deacon in Auburn, New York, became involved in his family’s life.

Without that man, is Greg Sankey here right now?

 

“There are moments when I have that reflection,” he says, with the Texas landscape sprawling endlessly behind him. “I never would have expected this.”

 

The man behind the glasses

 

Greg Sankey is not new to Texas.

He spent a decade living in Dallas as an administrator with the Southland Conference, first as assistant commissioner and then as commissioner. He recalls taking his two daughters to the State Fair, visiting the cow pens and eating funnel cakes.

But he was here long before that.

His first three semesters of higher education were at LeTourneau College in Longview, Texas. He was a backup catcher for the Yellowjackets and studied engineering, which he eventually bailed on because, as he quips, “No one wanted to plug into a socket designed by Greg Sankey.”

He returned home, enrolled at Cayuga Community College and played basketball there as a 6-foot-2, 180-pound jack-of-all-trades and “master of none,” he notes. It was then that he got serious with girlfriend Cathy, a local girl of whom he swept off her feet with a first date that featured mini golf and pizza. They’ve now been married 35 years.

 

He finished his degree at Cortland State and sought to be a teacher and coach like his mentor, John Wooden. Wooden’s influence on Sankey is hard to overstate. Within his office in Birmingham hangs a framed, handwritten letter from Wooden to Sankey dating back more than 20 years. It was a reply to a letter Sankey wrote to Wooden. He still remembers folding the letter into an envelope and hand delivering it at an event.

Wooden took it, slipped it into the pocket of his sports coat and, at least Sankey thought, forgot all about it. Weeks later, Wooden’s reply arrived.

 

Sankey’s office also features the original paperback edition of Wooden’s 1974 book “They Call Me Coach,” something he won in secondary school during a clean-desk competition (of course he did).

 

Like Wooden, he’s a note-taker, filling a new journal every two to three months and then disposing of the old one in a cabinet at his home. His own personal archive dates back to a hand-scribbled calendar of events he made in 1989.

 

In fact, halfway through Saturday’s Texas two-step, he points toward a black leather bookbag before him on the plane’s floorboard. Usually, he travels alone.

“You are interrupting my note-taking,” he says, a half-joking measure that cuts zero tension in the small space. He unzips the neatly organized bag to expose its contents: a stack of notecards and a leatherbound notebook. If not for this interview, he’d be spending this time hand-writing notes, both for himself and to others.

Instead, the 20,000-foot interrogation continues.

 

“I knew this was a bad idea,” he says flatly.

Was that a joke? Even those who’ve worked around him for years sometimes cannot tell.

In his ninth year as SEC commissioner and 21st with the SEC, he’s met plenty of celebrities in this role. Rock band leaders. Noted television personalities. Movie stars, even. (His most notable interaction, he says, was a conversation with former Sen. John McCain.)

 

On Saturday inside the Cotton Bowl, Sankey checked another off the list: actor Matthew McConaughey, the rabid Texas fan who attends many Longhorns games, hanging out on the sideline in his cowboy hat, bejeweled belt buckle and open shirt.

 

McConaughey is the walking embodiment of the University of Texas, loud, proud, bold, extravagantly dressed and easily excitable. The juxtaposition of McConaughey and Mr. Notetaker, the two of them immersed in conversation, is quite a laughing matter.

But the flirtation between these two entities — Texas and the SEC — dates back more than 30 years, when Roy Kramer sat atop the league. The interest peaked in the summer of 2011, when Texas A&M president R. Bowen Loftin phoned then-commissioner Mike Slive, Sankey’s predecessor and one of his longtime mentors.

 

To this day, Sankey recalls the exchange between him and Slive after that phone call.

 

“Is it real?” Sankey asked Slive of A&M’s interest.

 

“Very real,” Slive told him.

 

But there is more, the commissioner said to his protégé. Texas had seriously explored a move to the Pac-12 that year, only at the 11th hour deciding to remain in the Big 12. There would again come a time when the Longhorns’ eyes would wander.

 

“At some point,” Sankey told Slive, “Texas is going to call you. What are you going to do?”

 

Years later, Sankey, not Slive, got that call.

 

‘I’m not living in fear, but I’m concerned’

 

The man is an intimidating figure, standing even taller than Greg Sankey, his cowboy hat resting atop his head, a burnt orange necktie to match a plaid blazer and a pocket square to boot. He wears a gold wrist watch, is sporting custom alligator-skin boots and speaks in a drawl as if molasses is slowly spilling from his mouth.

Chris Del Conte is the athletic director at the University of Texas. And he is a walking, talking and well-liked caricature of a prosperous Texan. After all, last year, Texas and Texas A&M universities combined to gain $130 million in donations alone.

Del Conte saddles alongside Sankey, gesturing to a crowd — half burnt orange and half crimson — that is boisterously giddy despite the 11 a.m. kickoff.

 

“How about this?” Del Conte’s voice booms. 

 

“Now, imagine it with kickoff at 2:30? Let’s make it happen!”

 

As Del Conte and Sankey talk behind an end zone, members of the Oklahoma band, marching off the field after their pregame show, nearly run down the two men. By this point, the crowd roars like a jet engine. Cannons are fired into the air. And, all the while, a giant steer is steps away from the playing surface.

 

The passion, pageantry and people of college football on full display.

 

“You don’t get this in the NFL,” Sankey says, the second time he’s uttered such a phrase on this Saturday.

 

Is that coincidence? Or is it a strategically positioned comment at a time when college athletics finds itself stuck in a sort-of purgatory, still clinging to amateurism principles while outside entities shove it toward professionalism?

 

“College athletics has stood apart from pro football,” Sankey says. “People will disagree and that’s fine, but there are differences and we saw them today.”

 

Many within college athletics claim that the industry is under attack from external forces. Many of those external forces say that the industry — a booming billion-dollar business because of football — is operating as a cartel, illegally price-fixing and refusing to directly pay players.

 

Imagine college athletics as a sheep in the middle of a green pasture — a fat sheep, plump on years of million-dollar television contracts — that now finds itself surrounded by encroaching wolves.

 

Will it be devoured?

 

Sankey chortles at the analogy. But it’s true.

“I’m not living in fear,” he says, “but yes, I’m concerned.”

 

While name, image and likeness gripes garner most attention, the more impactful external forces exist not in statehouses, but in courthouses.

 

Two cases (House and Hubbard) seek retroactive benefits for athletes that may stick the NCAA with a $1 billion-plus price tag. Separately, both the judiciary and executive branches of the U.S. government are poised to deem athletes as employees in a matter of months.

 

All of these cases can and likely will be appealed, with final rulings not coming, in some cases, until at least 2026.

 

The House case could be “catastrophic,” Mississippi State president Mark Keenum said in the spring.

 

“We don’t generate enough revenue to cover the operations — billions of dollars,” said Keenum, a power player in the industry and the chair of the College Football Playoff’s primary governing body. “If everything went against the universities being sued, you’re going to have major ramifications. Where do those dollars come from and what’s left after you make those payments?”

 

Fantasy Basketball is here.

 

Of the more than 350 NCAA Division I athletic departments, only a small portion of them generate significant revenue, most of it from football, funds that are then pumped back into the department to support money-losing Olympic sports, million-dollar coaching salaries and facility upgrades.

The cost of such cases may be steep enough to finally trigger the long-talked-about split, when the 133 FBS schools or 69 Power Four programs part from the association.

 

But the cost of athlete employment may bring even more change. Most college athletic departments rely on subsidies from their state and school to keep afloat. An employment edict will not only result in the discontinuation of athletic teams but the shuttering of entire athletic departments.

 

So, what’s the solution?

 

Before a room of athletic directors three weeks ago in Washington, D.C., Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy was asked such a thing.

“Frankly, I think that question is irrelevant,” he deadpanned. “I think it is too late. Big-time college sports is professional sports. … The appellate courts and the Supreme Court are going to strike down the existing system and paradigm sooner rather than later.”

 

Is it time to break from the NCAA?

 

In the 1990s, when Tony Petitti was just a young up-and-comer in the sports television industry, well before he became commissioner of the Big Ten, he helped strike what is now one of the most celebrated media contracts in college football history: the SEC on CBS.

 

“When I got to CBS, [CBS president] Sean McManus and I had the idea of making them a national conference on CBS,” Petitti recalls. “That deal became the CBS 3:30 game.”

 

Why, yes, the current Big Ten commissioner helped make the SEC, in many ways the Big Ten’s chief rival, what it is today. But Petitti’s history with the SEC and commissioner Greg Sankey is more than just a cute storyline.

 

In one of the most significant developments in the college athletics world, commissioners from the Big Ten and SEC, the two most influential leaders presiding over the two richest conferences in America, are not only in regular communication — they are, together, exploring the future landscape of the industry.

 

Conference leadership has been discussing “the big issues that face college athletics,” Petitti told Yahoo Sports this summer. “There are so many things going on and we are so like-minded. We have a lot more to do together than we don’t.”

 

In a few months, the Big Ten and SEC’s relationship has turned from frosty to warm, sparked by the leadership change from Kevin Warren to Petitti in the spring. What the future holds is somewhat unclear, but both Sankey and Petitti have expressed an intent to both accelerate NCAA governance and condense the amount of schools operating under a single umbrella.

 

“How do you take larger groups and make them smaller to drive forward?” Petitti asks.

Over the course of Saturday’s parade across Texas, Sankey speaks candidly and suggestively about this growing topic in college athletics: the long-discussed Power Four or FBS split from the NCAA.

Is it a solution for some of the legal entanglements? Maybe. Will it cause other issues? Probably.

 

But Sankey is reaching the point of exhaustion in the NCAA’s governance model, where the more than 350 programs legislate together despite drastically different missions and resources.

A member of the NCAA Division I Council, Sankey just returned from two days worth of council meetings last week in Indianapolis and he is “questioning the value of it,” he says. Non-football playing and FCS members have “too much influence” on certain rule-making committees, he says. Small-school votes continue preventing rule changes that his conference can afford.

And don’t get him started on the failed vote last year of a fourth full-time baseball assistant coach. Or the fizzling of the proposal to expand scholarships to a sport’s full roster.

 

Did you know, he asks, that the SEC has no representative on the Division I baseball committee? The league has won nine of the last 14 College World Series and four in a row. “There is no system where that makes sense,” Sankey says.

 

Having a subsection of programs governing themselves does not require small-league programs losing their golden goose: the automatic qualifying spot in the NCAA basketball tournaments.

 

“There is something healthy about March and non-conference scheduling in college football,” he says. “The breadth has meaning. But we have to look at the governance structure. Is this the best way to do it, to put Fordham and Florida in the same room to discuss issues?”

 

Or Texas A&M and Texas State, for instance — the first with an athletic budget of more than $190 million a year and the other with a budget of $37 million.

 

The Aggies’ exorbitant wealth is on display inside Kyle Field, where Sankey arrived from Dallas about five minutes into kickoff. As he walks into the stadium — a goliath of a structure that seats more than 102,000 people — he is reminded of the very first game he visited as commissioner in 2015 here at Texas A&M.

 

“I walked into the stadium and it hit me: I’m in charge,” he recalls. “One of those few times that I was overwhelmed by the role.”

Such a public acknowledgement to a sensitive moment is another example of the SEC commissioner peeling away the boring exterior and permitting us a peek at the more interesting and colorful man within.

Over the last two years, Sankey has shed that shell of his. He’s given the college sports world evidence that Greg Sankey is, in fact, human and not a cyborg creature, or some administrative version of Alabama’s legendary and robotic football coach.

He’s lobbed subtle jabs at various entities, his primary targets include the Knight Commission, the slow-moving NCAA committees on which he sits and the now-defunct Alliance between the Big Ten, ACC and Pac-12. He has even not-so-subtly made a crack at Warren, the former Big Ten commissioner who, Sankey says, saw the world differently than him.

 

That’s not the case with Petitti, like Sankey a fellow New Yorker. The two leaders have “touched on key issues” together, Sankey says.

 

One of those is NIL.

 

Sankey declines to reveal details of their discussions, but many within college sports believe that an SEC and Big Ten-led NCAA split may be the answer to NIL, opening the door for a more direct system of pay to players.

 

In an interview with Yahoo Sports last month, outgoing Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith suggested a change to the scholarship structure to include the addition of NIL payments in a similar way that schools pay cost of attendance. Smith also continues to believe that the CFP should govern college football, not the NCAA.

Meanwhile, Sankey’s league continues to explore a way to govern the concept from the conference level by having all 12 SEC state laws mirror one another — a tall task but not impossible, Sankey says.

In the meantime, any movement on an NIL congressional bill is waning as the presidential election season draws closer. Another congressional hearing is expected on Oct. 17, this one before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It serves as the 10th such hearing since college leaders began lobbying Congress for federal NIL legislation in 2019. While dozens of bills have been proposed, none have even taken the first real step in passage.

 

Appearing at the hearing as a witness will be NCAA president Charlie Baker, sources tell Yahoo Sports — a notable move from the association’s new leader.

 

Politics are not absent at Kyle Field. In one of his last stops here, Sankey met with Sen. Ted Cruz and staff, a most fitting place for the intermingling of sports and politics: a $10 million midfield suite at a mammoth football stadium in the middle of Texas.

 

“He says they are talking,” Sankey says when asked of his conversation with Cruz. “They are trying.”

 

The pressures will only mount from here. The College Football Playoff is in the late stages of landing what will likely be a $1 billion-a-year television contract, having already received presentations from at least five networks: Fox, ESPN, Amazon, Turner and NBC.

 

As more money gushes into the industry, the external forces will grow.

 

Sankey’s legacy is built here, not physically here in that Kyle Field suite, but on these complex topics, issues that threaten to strip the unique characteristics from college athletics, that may cripple Olympic sports, that may destroy the tether between major college sports and higher education.

In nearly a decade on the job, his most significant decisions have come in the last three years: to play a 2020 football season through a pandemic when others folded; and expanding to a 16-team league with Oklahoma and Texas.

 

He refers to the first as possibly “the most significant accomplishment in the history of college football,” an altogether unforgettable season in which he often sat on his porch and thought, “What did I get myself into?”

 

On the second one, he’ll be damned if the history books purport that his league’s decision to add Oklahoma and Texas set off the current chain of realignment madness.

“That is an inaccurate evaluation of reality. It assumes some of the other moves were not going to happen,” Sankey said. “I don’t believe that’s true.”

 

What more does he want to accomplish? “I want to lead through the change that has been placed before us,” he answers.

Sankey’s legacy may be connected most to the next three to five years, when a tidal wave of change is certain to crash into the sport.

 

This fight could be the biggest of them all.

Can he do it? He tells a story of his pipe-laying welder of a grandfather, Gene. Little Greg once failed at a task and Gene leaned over to his grandson and thundered a mantra that still has an impact on Sankey all these years later: “A pipeliner always gets the job done.”

 

Everything’s about to get bigger

A couple hours later, leaving Kyle Field on Saturday night, his whirlwind trip over, Sankey’s brown pants barely show that spot of barbecue sauce. And his blue sports coat? He’s brushed most of the powdered sugar away.

 

The stains are gone but the memories remain — one in particular.

 

As Sankey and company left the Cotton Bowl in a golf cart bound for the parking lot, the commissioner flagged for the driver, Ramirez, to slow down as the funnel cake stand approached along Coliseum Drive.

In a huff, Sankey stumbled out of the golf cart and flashed a wad of bills, ready to purchase one of his favorite snacks for everyone.

 

“You need coupons,” the woman behind the counter told him.

 

As he hustled to the coupon stand a half-block away, Ramirez leaned over the counter, “Do you not know who he is?”

 

“No,” the woman said.

 

“He is the SEC commissioner,” Ramirez said.

 

A man shuffled from the fryer to the counter, “He’s with CSI?”

 

“No, SEC. Southeastern Conference.”

 

“Oh,” the man behind the counter said, “is he the guy who races turtles on television?”

 

OK, so maybe this isn’t SEC Country after all. At least not yet.