NASHVILLE, Tenn. – To reach the main entrance of the Grand Hyatt Hotel where SEC Football Media Days are being held this week, the local DOT detours traffic three blocks north in a single lane traveling between concrete barricades, directs it into a U-turn, then brings it back three blocks in the opposite direction to 10th Avenue. Once inside the 25-floor hotel, one can look west off from the rooftop bar toward the Broadway honky-tonks and find 10 massive boom cranes in immediate view, all of them occupying different construction sites.
The place called Music City is truly a boom town.
SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey is not one miss such a metaphor. The recent recipient of a contract extension, Sankey compared the “pain and progress” the city of Nashville is enduring to massive changes the conference he oversees is undergoing.
“I usually don’t recognize road crews, but I appreciate the fact that progress comes with a little bit of pain,” Sankey said in his opening remarks at lunchtime Monday. “The Tennessee Department of Transportation was actually really helpful, along with the locals, in coordinating their construction schedule. But progress needs to happen; it has to happen.”
And it is clearly happening in the SEC.
The league is still experiencing the growing pains of expansion. It will increase to 16 teams with the additions of Oklahoma and Texas in 2024. This fall will be the last football season that 14 teams will compete in two divisions to decide a conference champion.
Next year, divisions will go away. For now, the SEC will stick to an eight-game schedule for the ‘24 season, but Sankey emphasized that the nine-game model “will still be part of our discussion going forward.” A decision date remains very much in flux.
However, Sankey added that he does not anticipate more expansion any time soon.
Currently, the SEC is at the forefront of the national grapple with Name, Image and Likeness. Since the Supreme Court sanctioned its legality in 2021, universities have formed “collectives” that funnel money en masse to athletes, particularly those in the revenue-producing sports of football and basketball. Those collectives have been further emboldened (enhanced) by hastily-enacted state laws – rarely duplicated from one state to the next.
Allowing that NIL is in many ways “a net positive for college athletes,” Sankey identified the current form it has taken to be “the exact wrong way to go about getting student-athletes to engage.”
“They deserve something better than a race to the bottom at the state-legislature level as efforts are made to achieve what is perceived as a competitive edge through state laws that are not oversee,” Sankey said. “Future student-athletes, those who now may be 15- or 16- or 17-years-old, they deserve something better than having to sort through a fully-unregulated marketplace and being approached by individuals who present themselves as something that they may not be.”
He spoke of a need for a national standard that would require the registration of agents, provide transparency and communication between institutions and financial support. As he has at virtually every turn, Sankey maintained that the U.S. Congress – not the NCAA – is the only entity that can fix the issue. The league sent a lobby there earlier this summer. However, he allowed that such a route to a solution remains in the throes of construction.
That is very much the state of the city of Nashville, which is hosting SEC Media Days for the first time in league history this week. From 1985 until 2017, the event was held every year in the city of Birmingham. Atlanta hosted in 2018 and again last year.
Sankey announced that the SEC’s annual kickoff event will be held next year in Dallas. That had been somewhat of an expectation soon after the additions of Oklahoma and Texas were set to become official in 2024. It will be held at The Omni Hotel in downtown Dallas July 15-18.
Sankey indicated the annual preseason talkfest will continue to “move around” in the future.
Sankey did acknowledge that SEC Football Championship will remain in Atlanta for the foreseeable future. The league is currently in negotiations with Mercedes-Benz Stadium to extend the current agreement that runs through 2026.
However, Sankey did not shut the door altogether on the possibility of the conference’s marquee event also moving around eventually. Among the many booms throughout the city is one across the river where the Tennessee Titans’ home currently resides. There the city is erecting a domed stadium and city leadership already has expressed interest in the SEC conducting its football championship there occasionally, if not permanently. The new facility is tentatively scheduled to open in 2026.
“One of my favorite books is titled ‘The Art of Possibility,’ and what Nashville is doing just opens up the art of possibility here,” Sankey said. “There are football possibilities here, basketball possibilities on the national scale, and I’ve communicated that on repeated occasions.”
But Sankey reiterated that “we are going to focus our football game, which is the envy of college football, on what we do in Atlanta. That’s where our focus is for that particular championship,” he said.
Atlanta recently beat out Nashville to become the Southeast’s host city for the 2026 World Cup in soccer. The cities currently are locked a head-to-head battle to land the 2031 NCAA Final Four in men’s basketball.
What’s evident by the scene here this week is that Nashville is not resting on its laurels. Neither is the SEC.
“We see the pain of progress right outside the Hyatt as the road is being deconstructed so it can be rebuilt,” Sankey said. “That’s a pretty good metaphor for what’s happening here, whether it’s concerns about state laws or understanding the realities of new opportunities. We’re trying to really dig in on all that’s happening, and that’s pain and that’s progress.”
