Greg Sankey: ‘Historic change’ ahead, UGA president wants SEC to take lead

Some, such as the recent change to a one-time transfer portal this past year, have benefited the management of the program, as Smart explained.

“I would say the biggest investment of time is the portal and retaining your players. That all falls under roster management,” Smart said. “That’s where most of the time goes, because your time is dedicated to retaining your roster or evaluating other rosters. So the more you have to evaluate, the more time you have to dedicate to it to see who goes in (to the portal) and see who you are targeting.”

The elimination of the second portal window, Smart said, has allowed the Bulldogs to focus more on player development and planning.

“In terms of this offseason, this year is different. We haven’t had to (invest extra time) since the portal closed, and our roster became our roster,” Smart said. “Since school started, I haven’t had to invest a lot of time in that because there’s no second portal to retain your roster or go see about somebody else’s, so we’ve been able to focus a lot more on our team.”

Smart notably led the charge for a one-time transfer portal at the SEC spring meetings last spring, saying at the time that the portal was “the biggest decision that has to be made in college football.”

Sankey, who met with select reporters at the SEC men’s basketball tournament in Nashville last week, told On3 reporter Chris Low that in college sports, there are other major issues that need to get ironed out.

“We’re in the middle of historic change, and it’s going to be messy,” Sankey told On3. “It’s going to be uncomfortable — it’s never going to be what that it was, but it doesn’t have to be the way that it is.”

Sankey, and many others in collegiate leadership positions, has been focused on the so-called SCORE Act, which ideally would put an NIL framework in place, while also preventing athletes from being classified as employees and providing antitrust protection for the NCAA.

Sankey, specifically, aims for legislation that would put programs on a level playing field when it comes to the operations of NIL dealings and ensure compliance.

SEC coaches, athletic directors and school presidents are expected to dial into the issue more at the league’s spring meetings in Miramar Beach, Florida from May 27-29.

“When we go to Destin, I think all of us want some clarity around national policies related to tampering,” Sankey told the reporters in Nashville last week. “We’ve talked about it and probably have unique views, the issues around eligibility,” Sankey said.

“We have been consistent in stating clearly that the ongoing NCAA waiver system creates confusion. It raises questions of inconsistency and, fundamentally, what coaches seek is an understanding of who they can recruit and who has forfeited their collegiate eligibility.”

Sankey has said he’s in favor of a one-time transfer policy, but like most everything else, that would surely face legal challenges.

That’s why getting the SCORE Act passed in Congress takes on greater importance as college athletics looks for unification.

“What I have said in the beginning, when the states started acting and the NCAA failed to pursue what I think would be litigation to stop state by state, state laws are going to become competitive,” Sankey said.

“I think some of the laws in our (SEC) footprint were reasonable standards for the implementation of name and likeness. And then you had states outside our footprint that said, ‘Well, the school can pay for it,’ or there weren’t any laws, or there wasn’t any oversight of laws. I said to the NCAA leadership at the time that people were going to get left behind.”

The SEC, like every other conference, has a degree of self-governance aside from NCAA legislation.

UGA president Jere Morehead has said the SEC should create and enforce rules on a broader level, telling Yahoo.com that if the NCAA was not going to pass the SCORE Act, “we may have to go our own way to create rules.”

Sankey indicated that does not equate to the league breaking off into its own college athletic entity.

“We have the interpretation that we’re somehow taking the ball and going home is a stretch, in my opinion — I think that’s a misinterpretation,” Sankey said last Saturday in Nashville. “But when you look at what’s embedded in that expression of frustration, it is (that) the NCAA entity has tried to adapt and is still not meeting the needs of conferences like ours.

“So, I think all of that frustration is, yeah, we’ll have our own rules. We’ve had our own rules. We may have more of our own. And we’ll continue to monitor the landscape and want to make an important contribution to a healthy culture.”