Column: Amid Sweeping Change, SEC's Greg Sankey Says College Sports is 'Not Broken'

The old man stands on his porch, fist shaking, yelling at those danged kids to get off his lawn.

“College sports ain’t what it used to be,” he sighs.

To put it succinctly, college sports isn’t what it was just five years ago.

In many ways — at its most fundamental level — it’s sometimes hard to recognize. Many lifelong fans of college sports think it’s dying, rotting from within, diagnosis greed, a fatal affliction of avarice.

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey is not among that group, however.

“Let me be clear,” Sankey said Monday morning at SEC Media Days. “From my perspective, college athletics is not broken. College athletics is not broken. It is under stress. It is strained.”

College sports is big business now, and has been for more than a generation. Football, and to a far lesser extent men’s basketball, generate hundreds of millions of dollars on college campuses. Those sports fund scholarships for non-revenue sports and so much more. The money generated by those sports has gone on to positively change the lives of generations of student-athletes and their families.

And now schools are eliminating some of those minor sports because the money they used to fund them is being redirected into the pockets of football and basketball players (and their agents and handlers and representatives, et al).

Rob Peter to pay Paul? Maybe. It is what it is. It is the future of college sports, it is here — and to some, it has ruined what once seemed like a perfectly manicured lawn.

Last week, when Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione revealed his forthcoming retirement, there felt like a lamentation in his voice over the drastic changes that have taken place since 2021, and how those changes are complete opposites to some of the tenets on which college sports was built.

“Learning how to handle it is also being self-aware that we spent pretty much a lifetime building a model that was so different than where we're going,” Castiglione said.

“So I hope, my hope still, is that college athletics stays true to its core that is connected to the North Star, which is education.”

That almost feels like an unfamiliar idea these days.

NIL arrived in 2021, and it’s been an unregulated mess. “Now It’s Legal,” Barry Switzer calls it. It could also stand for “Nobody Isn’t Lying.”

At their bitter core, early NIL ventures offered players untold riches through sketchy collectives that formed overnight and never had any intention of actually delivering the funds.

But it’s 2025, and players (let’s stop with the whole “student-athlete thing” — sorry, Joe C.) come armed with agents ranging from shrewd to shady. They filed lawsuits, of course, mostly for breach of contract, though nothing tangible has hit just yet.

LSU coach Brian Kelly, who took the podium to open Monday’s coaches segments in Atlanta, proudly mentioned in his opening statement that he and his wife donated $1 million to LSU’s NIL collective.

Switzer used to get hammered by the NCAA for buying winter coats for indigent players, or for paying to send players home for family funerals.

Sad, but now distantly quaint, like a grainy old episode of “Little House on the Prairie.”

Today’s athletes can’t even picture what that looked or felt like — and that, at its core, is a good thing. Athletes are the labor upon which college sports have been built. They should benefit. They should thrive. They certainly should have never been cold in the first place while on campus, should have never had to take a handout from their coach just to bury a relative.

But let’s add even more context to Kelly’s personal donation to pay players to come to LSU.

“We had 1,600 supporters follow that up that raised that number to about $3.5 million,” Kelly said. “That's the kind of passion that we have at LSU.”

Kelly has a 10-year contract worth $95 million. A million to him is nothing. And the best way for him to keep that contract is to win games. The best way to win games is to sign more elite players. And the best way for him to do that is to get them paid.

Kelly’s million dollars is nothing more than a sound investment in his own future.

But Kelly couldn’t stop there. Because, you know, this is “college sports” and all.

“It comes back to the one goal that I started with: I want to graduate our players and play for championships,” he said. “Whether it's on the field, in the classroom, in the community, it's developing great young men on a day-to-day basis.”

How noble!

“Look, I think it's the nature of where we are in college football,” Kelly said. “We have revenue sharing, NIL. Look, we're early on in the process here. This is the first step towards what we're trying to put together. I'm excited about college football. I'm excited that we have something in place relative to revenue sharing.”

Castiglione said he hopes the current state of college sports “finds its footing, its structure, to be successful in a changing world where it's OK to celebrate your athletes, and it's OK for them to share in something that is making the overall program successful — and they still want to come and be part of a great university. They want to develop, they want to have the relationships with coaches. They just can do it in a new structure.”

That sounds ideal, a win-win scenario.

Sankey stood at the podium Monday morning sounding fully aware of the challenges he and his league and its universities face, but still undaunted — even hopeful.

“We’re living through a transformational moment across college sports,” Sankey said. “In fact … I don't think there's been a time in the last hundred years where so much change is in front of the college athletics enterprise as exists right now. It's actually amazing and exciting to consider the importance of the time during which we lead and serve.

“The answers we seek are tied into the complexities that have been referenced over time. … I don't think the answers come from courtrooms completely.”

Sankey said he usually writes out at least an outline for his media day comments in June, but said if he’d done that this year, the landscape would have drastically shifted before he could give anyone those thoughts.

“It literally would have changed on a daily basis because it seems as if one wakes up and there's a new story, a new opinion, a new piece of commentary, or a new direction that's been suggested,” he said.

The House v. NCAA settlement and revenue sharing arrived on July 1. But the College Sports Commission sent a memo to Division I athletic directors on July 10 that it would deny the majority of proposed future NIL deals because they weren’t a “valid business purpose.” On Monday — it’s July 14, two weeks into revenue sharing — attorneys for the plaintiffs in the settlement threatened more legal action against the CSC for already violating the terms of the settlement.

The SCORE Act is a bipartisan bill constructed to give college sports some direction, and news broke on that late Monday morning following Sankey’s comments.

The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade will host a markup of the SCORE Act on Tuesday.

Another notable step for the bipartisan bill. https://t.co/AUoey0G5NC https://t.co/rP8F4654Yz
— Pete Nakos (@PeteNakos_) July 14, 2025

That’s how fast this thing is evolving, and how nimble the coaches, ADs, conferences and other administrators must be as new rules, guidelines and laws come into effect almost daily — acting and reacting almost in the same stroke.

“Those of us in higher education embedded in college athletics know the intricacies of what's in front of us,” Sankey said, “and we all have to continue to adapt and have adapted as we seek to provide life-impacting opportunities and lifelong memories for young people across our nation.

“If you watch the college football landscape change across the Southeastern Conference, we remain both proud of what we achieved and excited about our future. That future is not something we wait for. It is something we seek to shape.

“We have Congressional activity. We wonder what might be the next state law to be introduced or the next lawsuit. We're interested in litigation that has resulted in individuals being eligible to participate in college sports well into their mid-20s; that starts to remove opportunities for aspiring high school athletes. There are opinions around collective bargaining.

“There is a lot going on in and around college sports. … There's no easy button for dealing with the complexities that we face.”