Tiger fans — It's Time for New Leadership — It's Time to Fire Greg Sankey

An Open Letter to SEC Nation from SaturdayWire.com — September 10, 2026

Part 1: To the Fans

Dear SEC Fans,

How many times have you heard, "go play an SEC schedule"?

Well, here's what a 24-team field would actually do: every SEC team with a 9-3 record or better gets into the playoff, and Big Ten teams finally have to play an SEC-type schedule to get through it.

This week, the CFP triggered a 30-day exclusive negotiating window with ESPN to work out the financial terms of exactly that format. Under the Big Ten's own proposal, there's only one guaranteed spot for the Group of 6 conferences — every other spot goes to the best 23 teams in the country, conference title games and automatic bids aside. Run this conference's actual depth through that math and, most years, every 9-3-or-better SEC team has a real case for the field. A Big Ten team that's built its ranking on a soft nonconference slate and an easy path to eleven wins would, for the first time, have to beat three or four SEC-caliber teams back to back just to reach a championship game. That's not wishing bad luck on anyone. That's just what a bracket built on merit instead of reputation looks like.

That number matters for a second reason: television. A 24-team field means dozens of new playoff games — real, sellable inventory — and this is exactly the moment a conference with the SEC's depth should be using that leverage to negotiate a deal that finally matches what it's worth. Instead, look at what Commissioner Sankey is actually asking for in that room. His memo to the CFP management committee lays out what the SEC needs to accept a 24-team field: make sure the conference gets back the money it would lose by canceling its own championship game, and require Power 4 teams to play ten games against other Power 4 opponents or Notre Dame to stay playoff-eligible. Read that ask again. It isn't "get the SEC a deal that reflects a field that just added a dozen new playoff games." It's "make sure we don't lose money." Commissioner Sankey has already admitted, on the record, that the SEC sits $400 million a year behind the Big Ten in its own media deal. The one moment in a decade when the SEC has enormous leverage in the room, and one of its conditions for accepting 24 teams is making sure the conference doesn't lose the revenue currently generated by its championship game. That's management. It's not leadership. That, as much as anything else in this letter, is the real case for why he needs to go — not one bad year or one bad take, but a pattern of playing defense in the exact moment that called for offense.

And it's not just the format and the TV deal. Look at what this conference already sacrificed trying to win the argument on merit alone. The SEC moved to a nine-game conference schedule this season — the toughest slate in the sport — specifically so its teams would stop getting punished for playing an easier one. From the SEC's perspective, it hasn't moved the needle nearly enough. The preseason polls, released before a single meaningful snap of that schedule was played, still have Oregon at No. 2 and Georgia — the SEC's highest-ranked team — sitting at No. 3, behind two Big Ten programs. This conference did exactly what it was told to do to earn respect, and the respect still isn't there. That's not a scheduling problem. That's a conference not fighting hard enough for how its own product gets perceived — and that starts at the top.

And you already know this didn't start today. You know it from watching a 9-3 Ole Miss team march into Athens, beat the No. 3 team in the country by 18 points, finish with the No. 3 scoring offense and the No. 2 scoring defense in the entire nation — and still get left home, back in 2024, the very first year of this format. You know it from the sick feeling of watching Texas go 9-3 against the hardest schedule in the country — playing five Top-10 teams, beating three of them — and still get told to go watch the Citrus Bowl. You know it from Selection Sunday, watching the committee flip Notre Dame and Miami at the last possible second with no real explanation, and realizing that's the process our sport's championship now runs on. You know it from watching Michigan walk away from a sign-stealing scandal the NCAA found serious enough to warrant a postseason ban it chose not to impose — with a fine and a few show-cause orders, no vacated title, no real postseason consequence — and asking yourself what would have happened if it had been Tuscaloosa or Athens instead of Ann Arbor.

Here's what should make it worse: this isn't a bad year. It's a pattern. We're not losing this fight because the SEC isn't good enough. We're losing it because no one is fighting for what the SEC has actually built. Nine SEC teams entered the season ranked in the preseason AP Top 25 — more than any other conference. And the SEC still leads with nine ranked teams in the first in-season AP poll, with LSU now at No. 8 after beating Clemson 51–10. Half the Top 10 wears SEC colors. And yet, every year, the format, the metrics, and the room where the decisions get made seem to work against us instead of for us.

Think about what real access would even mean. If the sport ever moves to a field big enough to actually reflect what conference is deepest — a 24-team bracket instead of endless 16-vs-24 committee meetings — a team like Notre Dame or Texas Tech wouldn't be facing one good SEC team on a random Saturday. They'd be facing the possibility of playing three, four, five SEC teams back-to-back on the road to a title. That's not a controversial format. That's just what happens when you finally build a bracket that matches reality instead of protecting teams that built their ranking on an easy October.

And NIL was supposed to be the great equalizer — the thing that finally let every program compete for talent on a level field. Instead, watch how it's actually playing out: "northern" programs are opening the season ranked in the Top 10 on name recognition and a soft schedule, cashing in on the same NIL money the SEC pioneered, without ever having to prove it against SEC-level competition until the calendar forces the issue in January. That's not competitive balance. That's the SEC doing the hard work in October and someone else getting the seed in December.

None of that is inevitable. It's a leadership problem. And it starts at the top.

Part 2: Fire These Presidents and Chancellors — You Voted for the Hardest Schedules in America. Now Own What They Cost.

This part isn't for the fans anymore. Fans can boo, fans can post, fans can boycott a bowl game the way Notre Dame just did — but fans don't sign contracts, and fans don't get a vote on who stays in this conference. You do.

Start with the one decision in this whole mess that has your fingerprints on it and not Greg Sankey's. Your athletic directors lobbied for a nine-game conference schedule. You approved it. And Phil Steele's 2026 rankings now put fourteen of the SEC's sixteen teams among the twenty-five toughest schedules in the entire country — Texas at No. 1, with Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi State, and Florida all in the top ten. You didn't just agree to play a hard schedule. You volunteered nearly your entire conference for the hardest slate in America, all at once.

Here's what you apparently didn't think through: the committee has already told you, in plain sight, that it won't reward it. Texas went 9-3 last year against one of the toughest schedules of any contender in the country — five Top-10 opponents, three of them beaten — and got left home anyway. That wasn't a fluke. That was the committee showing you exactly how much strength of schedule is worth to them: not enough. And now you've handed almost your whole league a schedule just as brutal.

So you have two honest choices, and only two. Go win the fight to get that schedule rewarded — a bigger playoff, a committee that actually credits who you played — or vote the nine-game slate back to eight and stop feeding your own teams to a process that punishes them for it. What you don't get to do is approve the toughest schedules in America, do nothing about the committee that ignores them, and then act surprised in December when a second and third 9-3 SEC team gets told to go watch a bowl game. That choice is yours. Not Sankey's — yours. And any one of you who won't make it, in either direction, has no business in that room.

And it's not the first time this room mistook stability for competence. Fourteen of you also sat in a different meeting and voted to keep Greg Sankey through 2028, using words like "visionary," "stability," and "positive force for advancing the SEC." So let's talk about what that stability has actually bought.

It bought a playoff spot for a three-loss Alabama team — one that got blown out in its own conference championship game — over that same 9-3 Texas team. It bought Vanderbilt going 10-2 with wins over Tennessee, LSU, and Missouri, carrying a better strength of record than either Notre Dame or Miami, and still becoming the first two-loss SEC team left out of the twelve-team field in the two years it's existed.

And this isn't new. Go back to 2024, the very first year of the 12-team era: a 9-3 Ole Miss team marched into Athens and beat the No. 3 team in the country by 18 points, carrying the No. 3 scoring offense and the No. 2 scoring defense in the entire nation — and stayed home too. That's a team that had already handled a full SEC schedule at the highest level and never got a single game to prove it could handle twelve more. Two different years, three different teams, the same result. That's not bad luck. That's a pattern.

Here's the part that should worry you specifically as the people who control the budget: stability hasn't even won the revenue fight. Commissioner Sankey said it himself this year, on the record, that the SEC's own ESPN deal is undervalued. By his own admission, the conference is pulling in roughly $400 million less per year than the Big Ten gets from Fox, CBS, and NBC combined — despite the SEC out-rating the Big Ten every year since that deal began. That deal runs through 2034. Nobody in that room asked why the conference signed a below-market deal and locked itself into it for a decade with no way out. You asked for an extension through 2028 instead, for the man who signed it.

That posture gets even harder to defend once you look at where this is actually headed. The $400 million gap is the old math — a snapshot of a deal signed before revenue-sharing and the current NIL economy existed at all. That number keeps growing across the sport every single year, which means any new SEC rights deal negotiated from here forward shouldn't be chasing a $400 million shortfall. It should be chasing an entirely new number. A bigger playoff alone — a 24-team bracket instead of 12, several dozen new playoff games instead of a handful — is exactly the kind of growth a conference builds a brand new media package around, not something it waits until 2034 to cash in on. A conference negotiating from strength uses this instability, a bigger playoff, and a booming NIL economy to walk away from the old $400 million conversation entirely and start a new one. Done right, that's not a deal measured in the hundreds of millions anymore. That's a billion-dollar conversation.

There's more than one lever here, and whoever runs this conference next should be pulling all of them: a renegotiation trigger tied to ratings performance instead of waiting until 2034, using the SEC Network's value as a bargaining asset instead of treating it like a side asset, and a credible willingness to shop the product across multiple networks — the way the Big Ten built its current model around Fox, CBS and NBC instead of putting its football package with a single network. None of that requires blowing up the deal tomorrow. It requires a commissioner who goes and gets it instead of simply naming the problem in a press conference and letting it go. That's the real choice in front of you: a manager who identified a $400 million gap and took a contract extension anyway, or a leader built for the NIL era who goes out and brings this conference a billion-dollar deal.

Meanwhile, watch what's happening one floor over. Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti spent this year publicly and aggressively pushing a 24-team playoff, and made clear he's prepared to wait however long it takes to get there. Commissioner Sankey spent the same year publicly holding the line at 16 teams, citing scheduling concerns. Maybe 16 is the right number on paper. But ask yourselves honestly: with nine SEC teams opening this season in the preseason Top 25 — more than any other conference — is a smaller field actually in this conference's interest? Or is "holding the line" just the safe, defensible position for a commissioner negotiating not to lose, instead of negotiating to win? The conference with the most depth in the country should be the loudest voice in the room demanding the biggest bracket and a media deal that reflects it — not the most cautious one.

You don't owe Greg Sankey loyalty. You owe your fans, your players, and your athletic departments a leader who treats access and revenue as the same fight — because right now, this conference is quietly losing both.

Part 3: The Receipts — Why the Status Quo Has Failed

Two more cases belong on the record. They're not really about which team deserved a 12th seed — they're about whether the process itself can be trusted, and whether this conference has been willing to say so out loud.

The Selection Committee Can't Explain Itself

For most of the 2025 season, the committee ranked Notre Dame ahead of Miami — including after Miami had already beaten Notre Dame head-to-head, 27-24, in Week 1. That gap held for weeks. Then, on the final Sunday of the season, with neither team having played a game in over two weeks, the committee reversed course and jumped Miami two spots ahead of the Irish for the last at-large bid. CFP chair Hunter Yurachek's explanation was that the committee hadn't previously viewed the two teams as comparable — and then, with no new game and no new information, decided they suddenly were. Notre Dame finished the year 10-2, having outscored its final two opponents by a combined 119-27. Its athletic director, Pete Bevacqua, said publicly that no explanation could justify the outcome and that a playoff spot had effectively been taken from the team's players. Notre Dame then did something no program had done before: it withdrew from bowl season entirely rather than play a consolation game after being told, without a credible explanation, that its season didn't count.

That's not really a story about Notre Dame. It's a story about a committee that can move a team two spots in its final ranking of the year without being able to explain why in a way anyone outside the room found credible. The SEC has more riding on that committee's credibility than any other conference, since more of its teams sit on the bubble every year than anyone else's. A conference serious about protecting its own interests should have been the loudest voice demanding the committee explain itself. Instead, the loudest voice in the room was a rival program's athletic director, on his way out the door.

Michigan Got Away With It

In 2023, Michigan won a national championship while running an impermissible scouting scheme the NCAA said was backed by overwhelming evidence — a multi-year, off-campus, in-person operation, directed by then-staffer Connor Stalions, that scouted 13 of its future opponents from 2021 through 2023. When the NCAA finally ruled in August 2025, nearly two years after the scheme became public, the penalties were a fine north of $20 million, four years of probation, and show-cause orders for the people involved — ten years for Jim Harbaugh, eight for Stalions. What Michigan didn't get was a postseason ban. What Michigan didn't lose was its 2023 title. Stalions appealed his show-cause order; the NCAA denied it in February 2026, upholding the original ruling in full, including the finding that investigators could never determine the true scope of what Michigan had done because evidence had been destroyed or withheld.

Run that same fact pattern through Tuscaloosa, Athens, or Baton Rouge and ask whether the coverage — or the punishment — looks the same. That's not a hypothetical anyone in this conference should have to whisper about. It's a fair question, and it's one the SEC's own commissioner — a man who has spent a decade building himself into one of the most powerful voices in college sports — has had every opportunity to ask publicly. He hasn't.

Part 4: What We're Actually Asking For

This isn't a call to burn the conference down. It's a short list of what its next leader actually needs to deliver — the things a manager protects and a leader goes and gets.

Negotiate the format like it's worth something. The next commissioner needs to walk into that room treating field size as a competitive weapon, not a scheduling headache. A conference with nine teams in the preseason Top 25 shouldn't be the cautious voice in the room — it should be setting the terms.

Take the offensive on expansion, publicly, not just at the negotiating table. Petitti has spent a year making his case to reporters, fans, and coaches out loud. The SEC's position has mostly come out in quotes about calendars and open weeks. Whoever runs this conference next needs to make the public case for why the SEC's depth deserves a bigger stage — before the Big Ten finishes making it for them.

Build real, conference-level leverage on NIL — not another letter to Congress. Asking federal lawmakers to fix a state-by-state patchwork has been the ask for three years running, and the patchwork is still there. A conference this size has the leverage to build its own enforceable standard with its member schools instead of waiting on Washington to act.

Mean it about leaving the NCAA — and bring real rules with you. Floating the idea in a press conference is not a plan. If the NCAA's governance model no longer serves a conference generating this much revenue and depth, the next commissioner needs an actual timeline, a real alternative, and a set of enforceable, player-protective rules written in advance instead of discovered in a courtroom. Cap transfers at two in a career. Require a minimum enrollment period so a roster is a team, not a rental. Put real financial-literacy requirements around the professional-grade contracts and NIL deals these eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds are signing, so they aren't left to figure them out alone. That's what writing your own rulebook actually looks like — not a quote that gets a headline and nothing else.

Hand this job to someone who grew up in this era, not someone still adjusting to it. NIL, the transfer portal, and revenue sharing aren't a phase this sport is passing through — they're the permanent operating environment now. The next commissioner should be someone whose instincts were built for that world from the start, not someone managing a transition into it a decade into their tenure.

Part 5: Closing

Breakups are never easy. This is still a breakup.

Ten years is a long time, and Greg Sankey built real things in it — nobody's disputing that a conference that added Texas and Oklahoma, kept playing through a pandemic, and enters this season with more ranked teams than anyone else in the country got that way partly because of decisions he made. But building things once isn't a lifetime appointment, and it's not a reason to look past the record piling up right now. So here's the record, one more time, all in one place:

• A 9-3 Ole Miss team with the best two-way statistical profile in the country left home in 2024, the first year of this format.
• A 9-3 Texas team with a top-10 schedule and three wins over ranked Top-10 opponents left home in 2025 — for a three-loss Alabama team that had a non-conference loss to a 5-7 Florida State.
• A 10-2 Vanderbilt team with a better strength of record than either team that got in over it left home too, the first two-loss SEC team ever excluded from this format.
• A selection committee that flipped Notre Dame and Miami in the season's final ranking with no explanation anyone outside the room found credible.
• Michigan running an in-person scouting scheme the NCAA found warranted a postseason ban — and keeping its national title anyway.
• A commissioner admitting, on the record, that his own media deal pays the SEC $400 million a year less than the Big Ten — and getting a contract extension instead of a fix.
• The one moment in a decade he had real leverage to negotiate a bigger playoff, and the ask on the table was to break even, not to win.
• A conference that wrote a membership rule so unclear it ended up hauling one of its own founding members into federal court over a two-player roster dispute — a self-inflicted mess no competent rulebook produces.

That's not one bad year. That's not bad luck. That's a pattern, and patterns don't fix themselves.

So here's the ask, plain. Presidents and chancellors: stop confusing stability with leadership, and stop mistaking a contract extension for accountability. Fans: don't let this go quiet the next time a Texas or a Vanderbilt gets left home in December — say something, post something, ask your own school's administration what they're doing about it, because they're the only ones in this fight who actually get a vote.

A manager protects a $400 million shortfall. A leader goes out and gets a billion-dollar deal. This conference has had a manager for ten years. It's time for a leader. It's time for Greg Sankey to go.

End Notes: The Sixteen

These are the institutions whose presidents and chancellors sit in the room and make these calls:

• Alabama
  Dr. Peter J. Mohler, President
  Phone: (205) 348-5100 · Email: president@ua.edu
  The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487
• Arkansas
  Dr. Charles F. Robinson, Chancellor
  Phone: (479) 575-2000 (main) · Email: chancell@uark.edu
  425 Administration Bldg., Fayetteville, AR 72701
• Auburn
  Dr. Christopher B. "Chris" Roberts, President
  Phone: (334) 844-4650 · No public direct email — contact via auburn.edu/president form
  Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849
• Florida
  Dr. Stuart R. Bell, President (as of 7/1/26)
  Phone: (352) 392-1311 · Email: president@ufl.edu
  P.O. Box 113150, Gainesville, FL 32611-3150
• Georgia
  Dr. Jere W. Morehead, President
  Phone: (706) 542-1214 · Address is email-protected on site — use phone/form
  220 South Jackson St., Athens, GA 30602-5000
• Kentucky
  Dr. Eli Capilouto, President
  Phone: (859) 257-1701 · No public direct email found — office line above
  101 Main Building, Lexington, KY 40506-0032
• LSU
  Dr. Wade Rousse, President, LSU System¹
  Phone: (225) 578-2111 · Email: president@lsu.edu
  3810 West Lakeshore Dr., Baton Rouge, LA 70808
• Mississippi State
  Dr. Mark E. Keenum, President
  Phone: (662) 325-3221 · Email: president@msstate.edu
  Mississippi State, MS 39762
• Missouri
  Dr. Mun Y. Choi, President (UM System) & Chancellor (Mizzou)
  Phone: (573) 882-2011 · Email: president@umsystem.edu
  105 Jesse Hall, Columbia, MO 65211
• Oklahoma
  Joseph Harroz Jr., President
  Phone: (405) 325-3916 · Email: officeofthepresident@ou.edu
  660 Parrington Oval, Rm. 110, Norman, OK 73019
• Ole Miss
  Dr. Glenn F. Boyce, Chancellor
  Phone: (662) 915-7111 · No public direct email found — office line above
  123 Lyceum, University, MS 38677
• South Carolina
  Dr. Michael D. Amiridis, President
  Phone: (803) 777-2001 · Email: president@sc.edu
  Osborne Admin. Bldg., Columbia, SC 29208
• Tennessee
  Dr. Donde Plowman, Chancellor
  Phone: (865) 974-3265 · No public direct email found — office line above
  800 Andy Holt Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996-0180
• Texas
  James E. "Jim" Davis, President
  Phone: (512) 471-1232 · Email: president@utexas.edu
  110 Inner Campus Dr., Stop G3400, Austin, TX 78712
• Texas A&M
  Dr. Susan Ballabina, President (as of 5/11/26)
  Phone: (979) 845-2217 · Email: president@tamu.edu
  1246 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-1246
• Vanderbilt
  Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor
  Phone: (615) 322-1813 · No public direct email found — office line above
  One Vanderbilt Way, Ste. 310, Nashville, TN 37240

If you go to one of these schools, if you're an alum, or you just care where this is headed — look up your own school's president's or chancellor's office and tell them directly what you think of this vote. That's the one lever fans actually have. Use it.