DESTIN, Fla. — There are two Greg Sankeys. The first one sometimes will say something that reminds you he was one of the people supporting the old ways and makes you wonder if someone who supported the old system can be trusted to build the new one.
The other Sankey, however, leaves hints that he does get it.
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In his first public appearance since the historic NCAA vs. House settlement, on the eve of the SEC’s spring meetings, both sides of the SEC commissioner were on display. Which side wins out, and how quickly, will mean a lot.
The necessary background for those who need it: The NCAA has agreed to revenue sharing, directly paying its athletes, as part of last week’s settlement agreement. But it was merely one part of the larger whack-a-mole approach in dealing with college sports issues. The chaos of the transfer portal and NIL is left unresolved. And some stakeholders — media members, lawyers, advocates, coaches and administrators speaking privately — believe having a collective bargaining agreement with the athletes is the only way to do that.
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But the first side of Sankey still sounded skeptical on Monday.
“To be in collective bargaining, you have to be in an employment situation,” he said. “I have not had a student-athlete come to me and say they want to be taxed like an employee.”
SEC officials this week will discuss "availability" reports, i.e. official injury reports.
Greg Sankey said not to expect any action on it this week. But the fact he brought it up himself indicates they're moving closer to it.
— Seth Emerson (@SethWEmerson) May 27, 2024
OK, let’s set aside the holes in that argument: Athletes already pay taxes on money earned via name, image and likeness and will do so on revenue-sharing payments. Also, those athletes may feel differently about employment status once they learn more about it.
Now, let’s understand what Sankey didn’t say in that short statement: We should never let athletes become employees. Maybe he feels that way. Maybe he will turn around Tuesday and say it won’t happen. But the man chooses his words carefully, and did he utter those words on Monday? No, he did not. He pointed out that athletes have it pretty good right now: essentially no transfer rules and no caps on how much they can be paid via NIL, thanks to various court rulings. A “cycle of constant litigation,” as Sankey put it.
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Why would athletes bargain away those rights, Sankey pointed out? Well — and this is me speaking now — because Sankey and company are still angling to get help from Congress to re-install some rules, as in to pull back some of those rights.
But there’s the second side of Sankey as he offered a notable push-back when asked about the perception that he and his colleagues want an anti-trust exemption, which presumably would allow them more leeway to make their own rules, such as on transfers and NIL.
“You have not seen me talk about antitrust exemptions. And I want to be clear on that,” Sankey said. “I have talked about safe harbors, about the ability for us to implement, with legal protections, whatever law might be enacted to provide support to student-athletes, so we can get out of this cycle of constant litigation.”
Basically, that would be a creative legal carve-out. Not an unwinding of the clock that somehow restores amateurism and negates NIL and other reasonable rights established during the past few years. And Sankey hinted at being open to that during a back-and-forth on Monday.
He was asked: Can you get out of this cycle of litigation without collective bargaining and employment?
“I’m not a prophet, but there’s an opportunity here, yes,” Sankey said.
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In what way?
“The breadth of the settlement is intended to give us a pathway. Provide a level of clarity about the future,” Sankey said. “That doesn’t embed employment automatically.”
But it doesn’t rule it out, Sankey left unsaid. As for collective bargaining, he cautioned that some states in the SEC footprint (and presumably elsewhere in the country) don’t allow unions on campuses. Maybe that’s a weak excuse, maybe it’s a good one. Sankey went on:
“As people write about collective bargaining in college sports versus professional sports, that played out over 30, 40, 50 years, with lockouts, antitrust lawsuits. There can be a better way. There’s an opportunity here. But in life nothing is certain.”
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But there are no transfer rules, I pointed out. There are no recruiting caps. So why not collectively bargain those things the way the pros do?
“You assume — you assume — that some kind of bargaining mechanism would resolve that,” Sankey said. “But understand the professional leagues started at the opposite end of the spectrum, which was complete restriction. You go back and read stories of people who said they’d rather sell insurance than go back and play in a fill-in-the-blank city. That’s not where we are.
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“So what I think not’s been made clear is the comparative realities with historic professional sports bargaining and where we are.”
Again, notice what Sankey was not saying: No, we will not collectively bargain, or no, we should not collectively bargain. Does it sound like he favors it? No. But he has had to do a lot during the past few years that he doesn’t like.
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This was all part Sankey the analyst and part Sankey the lobbyist. But he was fairly open-ended. Another reporter asked if schools could sign athletes to contracts with a new model, thus limiting transfers or even payments.
“We’ll see,” Sankey responded.
To some, this may all seem irrelevant. This may seem like too much being made of one commissioner saying not too much.
But it feels like more than that. The college sports world has turned over in the past four years, as have the power brokers: The office of the NCAA president has changed hands. So has the commissioner of every power conference, except the SEC. Sankey is the constant. And for a while Sankey was one of the holdouts, appearing before Congress a few years ago and saying “I’m not there yet” on NIL — as in players appearing in commercials and such — which a few years later is now granted as a simple, basic right.
Now, for those hoping to get some stability in college sports, for transfer rules that make sense, it would help for power brokers to seem to be moving in the direction of realistic ways for that to happen.
There’s a side of Sankey, the last commissioner standing from the pre-NIL era, that sounds willing to do what it takes to get there. Willing to cajole and nudge the other power brokers toward realistic solutions.
If that side of Sankey wins out, that stability that many want may still be restored.
(Photo: Seth Emerson / The Athletic )
