Speaker 1: This is Wins and Losses with Clay Trevis. Play talks
Speaker 1: with the most entertaining people in sports, entertainment and business.
Speaker 1: Now here's Clay Trevis. Welcome in the Wins and Losses podcast.
Speaker 1: This is episode three. If you haven't listened to the
Speaker 1: first two, I think you guys will really enjoy it.
Speaker 1: We had Jason Whitlock on episode one from FS one
Speaker 1: Speak for Yourself Episode two, the founder of Rivals and
Speaker 1: seven Shannon Terry, incredible entrepreneur, who saw entrepreneur who sold
Speaker 1: both of those for over a hundred million dollars to
Speaker 1: Yahoo and CBS respectively. Goal of the Wins and Losses
Speaker 1: podcast is to try and figure out how you ended
Speaker 1: up where you did, and also focus just as much
Speaker 1: on some of the losses you had along the way
Speaker 1: as the winds. It's easy to focus on success, but
Speaker 1: I think that oftentimes when we learned much more from
Speaker 1: the losses along the way. We're joined today for our
Speaker 1: third episode by SEC Commissioner Greg Sanky. You can find
Speaker 1: him on Twitter at Greg Sanky and tell him what
Speaker 1: a fabulous job you think he has done as SEC Commissioner,
Speaker 1: because he gets a lot of hate on there and
Speaker 1: I want you guys to flood him with love. Uh,
Speaker 1: Greg Sanky, are you excited to be the third guest
Speaker 1: on the Wins and Losses podcast? Um? I was on
Speaker 1: the first day of your radio broadcast, so I have
Speaker 1: slipped two notches. That's right, you did come on the
Speaker 1: first time. We didn't get the coverage. I remember that
Speaker 1: was outstanding. Well. No, I don't know what where our
Speaker 1: relationship has gone awry, but it's worth noting. So I
Speaker 1: to make a point there. I could also have multiple
Speaker 1: guests on the radio show, so we weren't the only
Speaker 1: guest on the radio show that day, but you didn't
Speaker 1: make the top three, which would get you a bronze medal.
Speaker 1: Um and as an important part of this this program.
Speaker 1: So for people who don't know you, uh, you can
Speaker 1: find him on Twitter and again i'd encourage you to
Speaker 1: follow him on Twitter at Greg Sanky. Always encourage people
Speaker 1: to let us know also what you think of these interviews.
Speaker 1: Feedback has been phenomenal so far, and I think both
Speaker 1: shanit Terry and Jason Whitlock have appreciated you guys reaching
Speaker 1: out and saying you've been listening. Uh. But Gregg, thank
Speaker 1: you. You You are the secugmission are taking you over for
Speaker 1: Mike's Live. And for a lot of people, that's where
Speaker 1: they started to pay attention to your career, right, That's
Speaker 1: where they suddenly became aware that that you were at
Speaker 1: the SEC office. The step up from number two to
Speaker 1: number one can be massive, and we'll get to that
Speaker 1: for a minute. But before that, you grew up where
Speaker 1: What was your life like when you were a young guy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I grew up as born in a place called Auburn,
Speaker 1: New York, which is ironic given that a city where
Speaker 1: I was born bears the name of one of the
Speaker 1: universities in the Southeastern Conference. That's about thirty miles west
Speaker 1: of Syracuse, in the Finger Lakes region, as it's known,
Speaker 1: which is pleasant in the summertime and not so nice
Speaker 1: in January and February. Do you remember, Uh, you grew
Speaker 1: up there, so you you're Did you remember watching any
Speaker 1: SEC sporting events when you were growing up in in
Speaker 1: that region? Yeah? Probably the first times would have been
Speaker 1: an n c A men's basketball tournament games. Uh, And
Speaker 1: then you know football games through the the old n
Speaker 1: c A package. People forget and and you know, if
Speaker 1: any people probably listening to the podcast. Don't realize that
Speaker 1: back in the seventies and early eighties, the n t
Speaker 1: A controlled all of college football TV, so there was
Speaker 1: a scarcity of of games on television. So I would
Speaker 1: have watched and when I when I start to have memories,
Speaker 1: probably late teen years, specifically of football games. Uh, you
Speaker 1: know Alabama Penn State National Championship game. Um. But Georgia
Speaker 1: when they won with herschel Walker and eighty um, those
Speaker 1: would probably be more resonant for me as it relates
Speaker 1: to the Southeastern Conference. Syracuse University being three miles away,
Speaker 1: captured more of the attention at that time in my life.
Speaker 1: So what sports did you play growing up? I played,
Speaker 1: you know, whatever I could. So as as a young kid,
Speaker 1: played baseball, basketball, and ice hockey. Um, the ice hockey
Speaker 1: career ended and junior high as I grew to be
Speaker 1: over six ft tall, so basketball took over. So baseball
Speaker 1: and basketball we're focused sports for me. And what were
Speaker 1: you best at? Oh, you know, it depends on what
Speaker 1: what level. There was probably a time, you know, high
Speaker 1: school basketball was pretty good. I played junior college basketball.
Speaker 1: I played baseball in college as well. I love the
Speaker 1: game of baseball. Um, but that doesn't doesn't relate to
Speaker 1: proficiency necessarily. What position do you play in baseball? Catcher?
Speaker 1: What was your what was your strength? Yeah? What was
Speaker 1: your strength? Dis catcher? Um, warming up pictures in the bullpen?
Speaker 1: So you were not on the field that much. I
Speaker 1: was in college as a backup catcher my freshman year. Um,
Speaker 1: and so I was. I had caught a knuckleball with regularity,
Speaker 1: which is interesting if you've never had that experience. Uh,
Speaker 1: you learn how to pay attention the whole way through
Speaker 1: the pitch motion until it lands in your glove. Literally. Um,
Speaker 1: that's okay defensively, But I was a backup catcher. Uh,
Speaker 1: probably learned a few leadership lessons through that, and I
Speaker 1: could bring some energy and enthusiasm to a team. Where
Speaker 1: did you go to school? So you go to college
Speaker 1: where and also in New York? Yeah? No, all over Actually,
Speaker 1: so all this discussion about transfers is relevant in my life.
Speaker 1: I started out at a small college. I was studying
Speaker 1: electrical engineering in Texas called Laternal College. How in the
Speaker 1: world do you end up there? I? Well, my dad is.
Speaker 1: My dad's a welder. He's a Union pipe fitter. Worked
Speaker 1: on the construction job for fifty plush years and worked
Speaker 1: around engineers and wanted to have a son who was
Speaker 1: an engineer. UM, and so I was the firstborn, so
Speaker 1: I was the first to have the chance to take
Speaker 1: a run at that experience, and uh studied that for
Speaker 1: a couple of years. Wanted to go to Texas. You know,
Speaker 1: it's time to live an adventure. Grown up in upstate
Speaker 1: New York. So it was pretty good engineering school, small
Speaker 1: private college, and that's what put me there. And then
Speaker 1: after a year and a half, I'm like, do I
Speaker 1: really want to be an engineer? I had a uh
Speaker 1: an engineering lab electrical engineering lab every Friday afternoon at
Speaker 1: like four o'clock. And from your college days, I assume
Speaker 1: you can understand that going to an engineering lab and
Speaker 1: studying circuitry at four pm on Fridays did not exactly
Speaker 1: make my heart beat faster. And it just really more
Speaker 1: than that, just started ing raising questions in my mind
Speaker 1: about what is it that I want to do and why?
Speaker 1: And so I ended up back in New York at
Speaker 1: a at a community college, junior college, UM, kind of
Speaker 1: recalibrating state and engineering and then said, you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be a teacher and coach went into education
Speaker 1: about graduating from Courtland State State University of New York
Speaker 1: System College at Cortland. I call it Courtland State and
Speaker 1: that was about an hour from where I grew up,
Speaker 1: and it was pretty uh, pretty much a utilitarian experience
Speaker 1: for me. I could do that, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: get into coaching at that point, so coached some baseball
Speaker 1: and junior high in high school basketball and ran a
Speaker 1: recreation program, just trying to to build a resume really
Speaker 1: early on. So this is like eighties sight seven. So
Speaker 1: when you went to Texas from upstate New York, first
Speaker 1: of all, the weather probably had to blow your mind
Speaker 1: how hot it was. But was that an unbelievable culture
Speaker 1: shock for you at that time? Because I I, for
Speaker 1: people out there listening right now, when I went away
Speaker 1: from Nashville to Washington, d C. To go to college,
Speaker 1: it was a big culture shock for me. And I
Speaker 1: feel like kids are more as as you know, the
Speaker 1: ages have have grown, They're more technologically astute, they're more
Speaker 1: aware of maybe what what different parts of the country
Speaker 1: are like. But that had to be wild for you
Speaker 1: to go from upstate New York to Texas, right well,
Speaker 1: First of all, I remember I was catching in baseball
Speaker 1: and it's like a hundred and two degrees putting on
Speaker 1: you know, chest protector, shin guards and a mask to
Speaker 1: sweat in and like, so that was a shock. I
Speaker 1: can vividly remember the first time I played in a
Speaker 1: fall baseball game, because you used to play fall games,
Speaker 1: and just like we're playing in a hundred and two
Speaker 1: degree heat and you have on the tools of ignorance
Speaker 1: as they're known, and just sweating profusely and yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: culture shak. I was trying to figure out, you know,
Speaker 1: how to survive in in college and trigonometry and Eldra
Speaker 1: and then calculus, so that was really my focus. But
Speaker 1: I vividly remember kind of being wide eyed that I
Speaker 1: was in Texas. But also, you know, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of Baptist churches around, and there as many Catholic churches.
Speaker 1: And in New York there are a lot of Catholic
Speaker 1: churches and as many Baptist churches. So those are like
Speaker 1: the quick impressions. You said your dad was a welder.
Speaker 1: Did you guys travel very much when you were growing up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a really insightful question. Um, given that that that work. Um, no,
Speaker 1: we were really fortunate. So my dad's dad did, you know,
Speaker 1: travel around from job to job across the country and
Speaker 1: and he didn't settle down until he was in high
Speaker 1: school with my dad, uh in the in the mid
Speaker 1: fifties and then late fifties actually, and then most of
Speaker 1: his life was in that central New York area. There
Speaker 1: was enough work with power plants, some nuclear power plants,
Speaker 1: gas fired coal fired power plants, along with gas lines
Speaker 1: and building that, um, we didn't have to have kind
Speaker 1: of the camper life that that some others did. In fact,
Speaker 1: he spent six months in the late sixties working in
Speaker 1: Korea on pipelines and we had a family film of
Speaker 1: you know, they literally took steel pipe twenty four in
Speaker 1: steel pipe and put it on the backs of you
Speaker 1: know workers, the Korean people who would carry it and
Speaker 1: put it in the ditch where we had side booms
Speaker 1: and bulldozers and backhoes to do that work. Um, and
Speaker 1: they're like livestock moving pipe and equip in those those
Speaker 1: films in the late sixties. Um, So that was really
Speaker 1: the only time that he spent time away. It was
Speaker 1: it was a good thing for us that, um, you know,
Speaker 1: we had a stable life and they still live in
Speaker 1: in upstate New York and has worked in the same
Speaker 1: UH United Association Plumbers and Pipe Fitters local union for
Speaker 1: you know, fifty plus years. You didn't know it then,
Speaker 1: but do you think having a blue collar background in
Speaker 1: terms of what your dad did has helped you to
Speaker 1: connect a little bit better with a lot of athletes
Speaker 1: who certainly are coming into the Southeastern Conference now who
Speaker 1: aren't all coming from you know, white collar backgrounds, right,
Speaker 1: I mean the people are coming in. Well, I think
Speaker 1: there's a couple of things as far as and it
Speaker 1: particularly relates to the theme of the podcast, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of what got you here? So two summers when
Speaker 1: I was in college, actually worked on the construction projects
Speaker 1: at nuclear plants, which sounds kind of like Homer Simpson, Mr.
Speaker 1: Burn right, But literally, UM spent those summers. You made
Speaker 1: great money. It was a lug and tug crew. You're
Speaker 1: picking things up and getting it ready to prepare. You
Speaker 1: obviously weren't doing anything that it had a long term
Speaker 1: functional or safety issue involved. But you know, it was
Speaker 1: ten hour days, so I had to drive an hour
Speaker 1: to work in a place called Oswego, New York, and
Speaker 1: it was an hour up. You had to be in
Speaker 1: place at seven am, and you worked until five thirty,
Speaker 1: and you work in six days a week, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, you had time and a half and and
Speaker 1: double time over like fifty hours. So when you're n
Speaker 1: years old, that's great. But I saw that life. You
Speaker 1: asked me about where people kind of boomers boom from
Speaker 1: job to job, and they had a travel trailer and
Speaker 1: they might have a family. And one of the great
Speaker 1: lines that was shared to me by one of my
Speaker 1: co workers is, you don't know what pressure is like
Speaker 1: until you've got your wife and your kids in the
Speaker 1: car and you have to pass a welding test in
Speaker 1: order to get a paycheck the next week. And people
Speaker 1: ask me about pressure, and there's pressure in this job.
Speaker 1: There's visibility that's not present for a welder. I also
Speaker 1: learned a really important lesson. Like the first year I've
Speaker 1: been up there, two months, I woke up, I was sicker,
Speaker 1: in one of those summer colds, just sore throw I said,
Speaker 1: I'm not not going to be able to go in today.
Speaker 1: My dad was working a different job. He was up early,
Speaker 1: and he looked at me and said, that's okay, just
Speaker 1: calm telling you won't be in UH today or the
Speaker 1: rest of the summer. That that can't make it the
Speaker 1: day that I went back and put on my work clothes,
Speaker 1: bought a box of tissues and a gallant orange juice,
Speaker 1: and I made it through the day, and you learn
Speaker 1: a little bit about a work ethic and those circumstances.
Speaker 1: So you said that you came out thinking you were
Speaker 1: going to coach, and we're talking to SEC Commissioner Greg
Speaker 1: Sanky here on the Winds and Losses podcast. You said
Speaker 1: you came out thinking you were going to coach basketball, baseball,
Speaker 1: whatever it was. Did you have a target of what
Speaker 1: you thought you were going to do. Yeah, I thought
Speaker 1: i'd end up UM coaching basketball is my my my
Speaker 1: focused at the high school level. First, My my field
Speaker 1: of vision for that point in my life was if
Speaker 1: he drew a three hour circle around Syracuse, New York,
Speaker 1: probably not much more north, but over to Aubany, Buffalo,
Speaker 1: down towards Binghamton, the Pennsylvania boarder. I figured I'd teach
Speaker 1: in some school there, initially UM and then coach, and
Speaker 1: my dream of dreams I used to think about. In fact,
Speaker 1: my senior year in college, I was an assistant varsity
Speaker 1: coach for a large school in boys basketball, and they
Speaker 1: talked about talked about going to the Final four and
Speaker 1: you know, sleeping six to a room. So like I
Speaker 1: was like, man, someday I could get to go to
Speaker 1: the Final four, and uh, maybe I could be like
Speaker 1: a Division three coach. In fact, John bee Line, who
Speaker 1: just took the Cleveland Cavaliers job, was coaching at a
Speaker 1: Division to college in Syracuseton. I'd go watch his games
Speaker 1: back in the mid eighties, had a friend who was
Speaker 1: an assistant coach on his staff. Um and his career
Speaker 1: is probably one that would have been the template for me,
Speaker 1: because he went high school to junior college, to smaller
Speaker 1: college and then uplod chain of Division one. But I
Speaker 1: could see my initial job, which never materialized by the way,
Speaker 1: I ended up right out of college going to work
Speaker 1: at a college setting, which recast the direction of my
Speaker 1: career and literally my life. So what happens then you
Speaker 1: graduate your thinking you might try and be a high
Speaker 1: school basketball coach, that's an ambition in your life, and instead,
Speaker 1: like a lot of people out there, you graduate from
Speaker 1: college and maybe you find a job doing something different
Speaker 1: than you had anticipated. What was that job. Yeah, I was.
Speaker 1: I became the director of intramural sports at Utica College
Speaker 1: in Utica, New York. And if you're old enough to
Speaker 1: remember the light beer commercials ken Brett what one time
Speaker 1: was in the less Filling Taste great commercial and ends
Speaker 1: with Utica Utica George's brother. So there's a minor league
Speaker 1: team and he had been traded enough. But UH literally
Speaker 1: applied through a newspaper for classified ad. That's that was
Speaker 1: my source. It wasn't like I didn't know anybody. I
Speaker 1: just sent a letter and a resume in to a
Speaker 1: classified ad right out of college. And I was sending,
Speaker 1: as you can imagine, resumes all over UH to to
Speaker 1: grab a job. And I was invited to interview. And
Speaker 1: I had actually two job offers. One was coaching women's
Speaker 1: basketball at the junior college and teaching, and then this
Speaker 1: intermural job. And I took the intermural job because I
Speaker 1: was able to attend Syracuse University on remitted tuitions. I
Speaker 1: worked full time and then every Wednesday I drive a
Speaker 1: little over an hour to Syracuse go to two classes,
Speaker 1: you know, to like three hour classes and one day
Speaker 1: and UH took two years and did the bulk of
Speaker 1: my master's work that way, and UM one of the
Speaker 1: really key decisions. I took the job, and I was
Speaker 1: gonna wait a year to uh to start my graduate program.
Speaker 1: I've been in college. I had taken five years to
Speaker 1: finish four year program because of my transfers and trying
Speaker 1: to figure it out. And UH, I said to my boss,
Speaker 1: he said, one day, were an' you going to start
Speaker 1: your graduate program? I said, well, I'm gonna wait a year.
Speaker 1: And he gave me the best advice of my career,
Speaker 1: which was he said, if you don't start now, you
Speaker 1: never will. So I went ahead and enrolled and started,
Speaker 1: and that just started a sequence of events from a
Speaker 1: timing standpoint that were critically important to the opportunities that
Speaker 1: have unfolded for me. How much did you get paid?
Speaker 1: Do you remember at that first job, supervisor? Fifteen grand
Speaker 1: a year before taxes and uh. That was a time
Speaker 1: period where remitted tuition had generally not been taxed. But
Speaker 1: I was fortunate for by two years of remitted tuition
Speaker 1: at a private university for a master's agree to also
Speaker 1: be taxed on that tuition benefits. So I would work
Speaker 1: weekends on the facility to supervise because I paid a
Speaker 1: little bit extra, like an hourly wage whatever it was
Speaker 1: five bucks an hour, just you know, trying to make
Speaker 1: it work. So what did you do is intermural supervisor?
Speaker 1: Did you actually ref games? Did you put together like
Speaker 1: the sports? I mean that what exactly was your day
Speaker 1: to day when you were doing that job. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: showed up at like ten in the morning, and I
Speaker 1: had to teach some some classes, but I'd be there
Speaker 1: till ten or eleven at night every every day of
Speaker 1: the week, and then depending on sports season, maybe till midnight.
Speaker 1: I put together the whole program, so you'd play flag
Speaker 1: football and volleyball, and and I just it was a
Speaker 1: creative opportunity had someone but they basically said, okay, here
Speaker 1: it is. And I had never planned on doing this work,
Speaker 1: but had had played intermurals in college, and and whether
Speaker 1: I was playing intermurals or running this program, I learned
Speaker 1: a key lesson which helps me today, which is, when
Speaker 1: you're like nineteen and twenty years old, you will tear
Speaker 1: your friends arms off to win an intermural championship, which
Speaker 1: is very to college students. It is a universal truth
Speaker 1: which which you know we face ethical challenges in the
Speaker 1: way fifty and sixty year old coaches conduct themselves, and
Speaker 1: it shouldn't surprise us. That's that that's the case if
Speaker 1: when they're nineteen and twenty, they're gonna do whatever. So
Speaker 1: you know, that was officiating. I learned a lot. I
Speaker 1: had the schedule sports and schedule the gym. I oversaw
Speaker 1: a facility with a pool and racquetball courts and weight
Speaker 1: rooms and kind of made it all work. I was
Speaker 1: the the very low person on the totem pole who
Speaker 1: was like, okay, you run the facility. You make sure
Speaker 1: it's open on weekends, that we've got lifeguards, and you know,
Speaker 1: things are set up for games. And I was a
Speaker 1: p a announcer for Division three basketball for a couple
Speaker 1: of years as well. I'm just kind of whatever opportunity
Speaker 1: was there. I took the mindset that that I'd say
Speaker 1: yes because it would provide a learning opportunity. So are
Speaker 1: you a single guy at this point running as a
Speaker 1: rector of intermurals. So how long? How long did you
Speaker 1: keep that job? Two years in fact, so this was
Speaker 1: graduate from college in seven and graduated in May and
Speaker 1: started that job August one. Um I was a lifeguard
Speaker 1: on a UH at the sailing club on a lake,
Speaker 1: which sounds more prestigious than it was. But I, you know,
Speaker 1: had enough money to put gas in the tank and
Speaker 1: put a deposit down on an apartment. Started in August
Speaker 1: and then my wife now then I were dating and
Speaker 1: uh November of eight, which clearly shows I didn't have
Speaker 1: a vision for being the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference.
Speaker 1: Because our wedding anniversary falls on the Alabama l s
Speaker 1: U weekend every year. So if I'd gone back to then,
Speaker 1: like if we could go back in time to suit
Speaker 1: us we Go, I think, right is the school. Yeah,
Speaker 1: working at us we Go, though, I show up at
Speaker 1: inter Murals and I walk into your office and inter
Speaker 1: Murals one morning and I said, Hey, I think you
Speaker 1: got a shot to one day be the commissioner of
Speaker 1: a conference. Your response would have been what um? Seriously,
Speaker 1: because that was not even on the radar screen. I
Speaker 1: will say a couple of things that I did then
Speaker 1: that were really um, there was some foresight there by happenstance.
Speaker 1: One is I bought an n C A rule manual
Speaker 1: because I was in grad school. I was in like
Speaker 1: it was really higher education master's degree, but they called
Speaker 1: an athletic administration or something like that, and so I
Speaker 1: started I read, like from cover to cover the n
Speaker 1: say A rule book, so I became familiar with that
Speaker 1: regular regulatory structure. I also worked at a place that
Speaker 1: was moving from Division one back to Division three. So
Speaker 1: a guy named Larry Costello. I came to know. Larry
Speaker 1: had played in the NBA coach the Milwaukee Bucks when
Speaker 1: Kareem played and they won an NBA championship in the
Speaker 1: early seventies. I mean, this is he's a Hall of Famer,
Speaker 1: just a phenomenal person. And so I got to be
Speaker 1: around people who had been in college sports or in
Speaker 1: professional sports at a higher level. So you know, I
Speaker 1: read this manual, I learned and got to be around
Speaker 1: people have had some sophistication and sport and then, um,
Speaker 1: I mean the master's program kind of devouring every piece
Speaker 1: of information about intercollegiate athletics that I could. So there
Speaker 1: was this kind of a flicker of a flame where
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have said you're crazy. I would have said, seriously,
Speaker 1: if you had come in and made that type of
Speaker 1: prediction that how many people do you think at that
Speaker 1: time had even read the n C double a manual,
Speaker 1: not many because it was really awkwardly written at the right.
Speaker 1: So this was right around you know, SMU death penalty time. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, len Bias at Maryland had passed away, which
Speaker 1: which resulted in a thorough review of circumstances there. Uh,
Speaker 1: you can go back and find this whole pay for
Speaker 1: play debate and some of my my master's observations, master's documents, papers,
Speaker 1: whatever you may call them. Just the comparison. I was
Speaker 1: kind of a ravenous consumer of information at that time,
Speaker 1: and it was the printed materials, sports illustrated, Sporting News,
Speaker 1: Sport magazine had a lot of long form, in depth reporting,
Speaker 1: which again is an illustration thirty years later. That's really
Speaker 1: those publications either don't exist or have certainly changed. But
Speaker 1: I took all that in as part of the educational process. Now,
Speaker 1: were you a good student when you were in high
Speaker 1: school and you were in college or was it that
Speaker 1: you found this particular area of interest and it just
Speaker 1: captivated you in some way? I mean, how would you
Speaker 1: assess your academic background? Yeah, I when I walked into college,
Speaker 1: I don't I was a good, good student, not great,
Speaker 1: wasn't in a like a great high school situation to
Speaker 1: prepare me. Um So, I walked into engineering school and
Speaker 1: I looked back and I was no more prepared to
Speaker 1: start studying engineering successfully as an eighteen year old than
Speaker 1: I would have been to uh fly an airplane at
Speaker 1: that point. Um So, I had to learn how to learn.
Speaker 1: One of the best things that happened to me as
Speaker 1: I ended up in a five credit our calculum calculus
Speaker 1: one class I sawphomore year, and I meant every day
Speaker 1: you had an hour long class and calculus with homework,
Speaker 1: and if you ever got behind, you were done. And
Speaker 1: the clay had taught me to learn how to learn.
Speaker 1: So of anything that happened my first couple of years
Speaker 1: of college, the process of learning to learn was critically important.
Speaker 1: And then I decided how I want to pursue something
Speaker 1: that I'm passionate about the sports, uh the sports area,
Speaker 1: but working with people and teaching kind of resonated, and
Speaker 1: so I became really successful from an academic standpoint, challenged
Speaker 1: myself a little bit more with with different classes from
Speaker 1: an elective standpoint, and then when I started my master's program,
Speaker 1: I remember vividly my first class. There's about a dozen
Speaker 1: people and we're studying the foundations of American higher education,
Speaker 1: which I knew nothing about. Ironically, I work in American
Speaker 1: higher education, so it was long term of beneficial experience.
Speaker 1: But we we'd have like an hour discussion lecture and
Speaker 1: then we break into small groups. And the first time
Speaker 1: I'm there, I realized everybody is in their doctoral program
Speaker 1: in this group, and I just starting a master's. So
Speaker 1: they've got some problem that I don't recall. And they
Speaker 1: go around the table and there's like six of us
Speaker 1: in this group, and they get to me and said, well,
Speaker 1: what do you think? And I was very honest. They said, look,
Speaker 1: I'm just starting my master's. I can't contribute anything to
Speaker 1: this discussion right now, but I promise you as we
Speaker 1: moved towards the end of the semester, I will figure
Speaker 1: this out and be fully engaged. And I offered that
Speaker 1: story just as a representation of the growth that happened
Speaker 1: from an educational academic standpoint along my journey. So by
Speaker 1: the end of the class, I was doing just that.
Speaker 1: And one of the people who sat at that table said,
Speaker 1: that's one of the most remarkable things that I that
Speaker 1: she had seen. She wasn't finishing her doctoral program, that
Speaker 1: you'd have the confidence, And I'm like, that wasn't confidence.
Speaker 1: I was scared to death to just admit what you
Speaker 1: didn't know, but promised that you'd catch up. And you
Speaker 1: did what you said. So you get your masters at
Speaker 1: Syracuse and what happens next? Yeah, so I finished that program.
Speaker 1: My wife and I were married in November of eight seven.
Speaker 1: Fast forward the spring of eighty eight. We had a
Speaker 1: conversation about what's next in her life. She was a
Speaker 1: registered nurse. Um. You know, it was early married life
Speaker 1: when you don't know really much about anything. I guess
Speaker 1: and looking back and with this conversation resulted in my
Speaker 1: observation that I always wondered if I could work in
Speaker 1: Division one college sports. And so I just started sending
Speaker 1: resumes out and I ended up with a with a
Speaker 1: response from a place called Northwestern State University in Nacadush, Louisiana,
Speaker 1: and I had written to remember Michigan, Arizona State, Syracuse.
Speaker 1: I talked to in Syracuse for a brief period of time,
Speaker 1: but I ended up buying my own plane ticket to Shreveport.
Speaker 1: They picked me up, drove me an hour south to Nakadish,
Speaker 1: and it was at a time when you could find
Speaker 1: a little bit about Northwestern State. They were one double
Speaker 1: A and football Gary Reasons, who played for the New
Speaker 1: York Giants, had attended their Mark Duper. The receiver for
Speaker 1: the Miami Dolphins. John Stevens was rookie of the Year
Speaker 1: in the n f C running back for the Patriots.
Speaker 1: So Bobby A. Barrett played there. So there was enough
Speaker 1: substance that you're like, okay, I go down there, met
Speaker 1: the A D and and uh, you know, just it
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like it made a lot of sense now,
Speaker 1: but then it's like, hey, here's our adventure. So we
Speaker 1: packed up everything in the summer of eight nine and
Speaker 1: uh drove a budget rent a truck pulling a seven
Speaker 1: Dodge Shadow on a two wheel dolly from Utica, New
Speaker 1: York to Nakadish, Louisiana. And we didn't have air conditioning
Speaker 1: in our car. It was like hot and humid, like
Speaker 1: I'd never really experienced, even the Texas Texas time. And
Speaker 1: like the plan was, um, I made five dollars a
Speaker 1: month in the internship, so I've gone from like eighteen
Speaker 1: thousand because I've been provided a raise down to six.
Speaker 1: I was married. I knew we had enough money to
Speaker 1: make it into December if Cathy and my wife didn't
Speaker 1: didn't get a job. She ended up pretty quickly becoming
Speaker 1: a nurse in the Nakotis Paris hospital. She worked third shifts,
Speaker 1: so like I'd go to work in the morning, I'd
Speaker 1: come home, we'd eat dinner together. She'd go to work,
Speaker 1: she'd come home, we got breakfast. She tell me all
Speaker 1: the overnight hospital stories, of which there were many adventures
Speaker 1: um during that time, and that that was kind of life,
Speaker 1: you know, there was you know, it was just she worked,
Speaker 1: I worked, and uh, you know, we didn't know a
Speaker 1: soul in that Louisiana. Probably really good for our marriage
Speaker 1: because we had to get along otherwise it was going
Speaker 1: to go really bad. I did that for a year.
Speaker 1: I became the golf coach. They needed a golf coach.
Speaker 1: I'm like, okay, I'll coach the golf team. No I was.
Speaker 1: I was average at a nice set of ping Eye,
Speaker 1: two clubs that were in vogue then, and the A. D.
Speaker 1: Saudi fired the coach. I walked into his office. He said,
Speaker 1: I need a golf coach. Remember, I said, like the
Speaker 1: p A a ouncer. I'd never say no, and so
Speaker 1: I took over as a goal I didn't know this.
Speaker 1: You took over as a golf coach at South Yeah
Speaker 1: nor Northwestern? Say, we didn't have a schedule, So I
Speaker 1: put us together schedule. We didn't have uniforms. I should
Speaker 1: like personally apologize to each of the players because they
Speaker 1: were gray Sam's a belt slacks for their golf uniforms
Speaker 1: that year. There's like college kids. That seems so wrong
Speaker 1: at this point. A lot of polyester involved, um, and
Speaker 1: then that we weren't. Some of the players probably better
Speaker 1: at golf than you, oh by far, every one of them.
Speaker 1: So how did you coach? How did you coach golf? Um?
Speaker 1: I made a lot of phone calls and I stayed
Speaker 1: out of their way. I got into tea times on time,
Speaker 1: and I really started asking them questions. I made sure
Speaker 1: that they were in a little bit of decent shape.
Speaker 1: I figured that that I couldn't help them on the course,
Speaker 1: but I could help them mentally in advance. So you
Speaker 1: played a lot of thirty six eighteen rounds and I
Speaker 1: started having and run the stadium ramps and they're like,
Speaker 1: why are we doing this? And I said, because you
Speaker 1: need to be in a little bit of shape. And
Speaker 1: then I remember vividly, like after we'd done this a
Speaker 1: few times and they think I'm crazy. We played one
Speaker 1: of these thirty six whole days and they're like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and these guys have finished last in the conference every year,
Speaker 1: by the way. We so we had this this thirty
Speaker 1: six whole day and when they finished, we're going out
Speaker 1: to dinner, and I said, I could tell I was
Speaker 1: a lot more prepared for this than than the guys
Speaker 1: I was playing. But they were all dragging at the end,
Speaker 1: and it was like a recognition of just the mental aspect.
Speaker 1: And then you ask questions and you know they all
Speaker 1: were going to have teachers and instructors anyway, even you know,
Speaker 1: thirty years ago, um and the guy before me got
Speaker 1: in a couple of fights apparently on the course of colleagues.
Speaker 1: So the fact I never got in the fight won't
Speaker 1: be be like a Coach of the Year awards. So
Speaker 1: so what was the rays to go for m intern
Speaker 1: there to what were you getting paid as the golf coach?
Speaker 1: Nothing that was a big Yeah. I had a nine
Speaker 1: thousand dollar budget and I went out and raised like
Speaker 1: another fifteen or twenty through a golf tournament. I wrote
Speaker 1: every p g A and lp A g A professional
Speaker 1: asking them for stuff for uh, you know, a silent
Speaker 1: auction and the golf tournament. A lot of them. Like
Speaker 1: one time that Peter Jacobson on an airline. I said,
Speaker 1: you don't know this, but you helped me like make
Speaker 1: my budget. Hail Irwin was awesome. He had won the
Speaker 1: US Open and sent me autograph passes. I actually had
Speaker 1: somebody bid for me. I have a Jack Nicholas Sports
Speaker 1: Illustrated cover when he won his last Masters, the autographed
Speaker 1: and so I didn't want people think I was doing
Speaker 1: anything wrong. So I had somebody bid for me to
Speaker 1: bid it up. Um just that's you know. He had
Speaker 1: nine thousand dollars was my budget. And you know you
Speaker 1: had to play a certain number of days and I
Speaker 1: forget the numbers, but we could play like half of
Speaker 1: what we needed to do. We had an old gray
Speaker 1: Ford van where if you pulled the the floor up,
Speaker 1: like the vinyl flooring, you'd see the road. Um it
Speaker 1: was there was an adventure in you know. He went
Speaker 1: out and recruited a little bit, and so I added
Speaker 1: some players over a couple of years. I got paid
Speaker 1: nothing for that. You're asking about salaries. So when I
Speaker 1: I was hired as director of compliance that next summer
Speaker 1: full time because they went through a pretty significant infractions
Speaker 1: case with the n c A. In fact, that's most
Speaker 1: allegations in the case I've ever seen. I've been on
Speaker 1: the Committee of Infractions for nine years. What were they
Speaker 1: cheating doing there? Men's basketball? Yeah, So they had a
Speaker 1: coach that had been an assistant actually at the SEC school.
Speaker 1: He came back to his alma mater and there was
Speaker 1: like a ten thousand dollar check that was offered and
Speaker 1: the defense was it was kind of a joke and
Speaker 1: it was a two or three year investigation. And so
Speaker 1: I'm there, I'm an intern. I decided I was going
Speaker 1: to stay because I was learning a lot. I've always
Speaker 1: decided to kind of put money in the background as
Speaker 1: long as we could survive and kind of grow my career.
Speaker 1: But I was there and they said, hey, we got
Speaker 1: this position, would you be interested? And I I didn't
Speaker 1: know a lot about it, but I like read the
Speaker 1: n c A manual as you were called, and it
Speaker 1: paid attention to the n c A newspaper that came
Speaker 1: out every week, so I knew, I knew what was
Speaker 1: going on. I get hired on like a Friday, And
Speaker 1: on Wednesday when an airplane to a committee on in
Speaker 1: fractions hearing at Colorado Springs and we're at dinner and
Speaker 1: the vice president university. We're just talking and and it's
Speaker 1: like I didn't need any job description because that night
Speaker 1: he looks at me and says, well, we know if
Speaker 1: we're ever here again as a university, thank you won't
Speaker 1: be with us. So that was one of those motivational talks. So, uh,
Speaker 1: I want to ask this dude, where did you meet
Speaker 1: your wife? Because you you bring her immediately down to
Speaker 1: the middle of nowhere, Louisiana to work as a nurse
Speaker 1: um and uh, and she's got to be thinking, what
Speaker 1: in the world you know by doing here? Where did
Speaker 1: you guys meet? Yes, she's from my same hometown. So
Speaker 1: we are a little town called Skinny Atlas, New York, um,
Speaker 1: which is a school district we lived in and she
Speaker 1: moved there in junior high and that's where I was
Speaker 1: born and raised in that area. So we knew of Yeah,
Speaker 1: we knew of each other. We first dated right when
Speaker 1: she graduated from high school. I've been through my freshman
Speaker 1: year in college and then it was a five year
Speaker 1: experience before we were married. And uh, all right, so
Speaker 1: how long did you coach the golf team? Three years?
Speaker 1: How much did they get better? Yeah, we finished like
Speaker 1: my first year, we weren't last, which was an accomplishment
Speaker 1: because they've always been last. And we went into the
Speaker 1: final day. It was a twosomes that we played, and
Speaker 1: we were playing South of Austin. And so I had
Speaker 1: one guy who his nickname was Taco. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is like there's a movie in here, right, So Taco says,
Speaker 1: let me go first. He says, I'm gonna play so
Speaker 1: fast that guy won't be able to keep up with me,
Speaker 1: will throw offs off his rhythm, and sure enough, like
Speaker 1: he gets up there, he says on the tea box,
Speaker 1: he says, hey, I'm gonna play fast. He he hits
Speaker 1: his ball across his big canyon that was off the
Speaker 1: tee to the green, and the next the part four
Speaker 1: but to the fairway across the kind of the chasm,
Speaker 1: and the next thing that gets up and just dunks
Speaker 1: it right in the canyon. Then like the whole teams like, hey,
Speaker 1: I think we might not finish last. This year, maybe
Speaker 1: we can get two ninths out of ten, and then
Speaker 1: we got to uh, I think we got to like seventh,
Speaker 1: and then we finished fifth and uh. You know, there
Speaker 1: had no money and no real practice facility, and we
Speaker 1: never won a tournament. We always we finished second like
Speaker 1: four times. So after my first year, I figured out
Speaker 1: it's all about scheduling. So you wanted a few tough
Speaker 1: tournaments so they could play up. But then I was
Speaker 1: always trying to find one or two where we could
Speaker 1: win and compete just to build some confidence. And we
Speaker 1: finished second like three times. But but I never had
Speaker 1: never had a victory. So what happens. Then you're there
Speaker 1: for three years, you're coaching golf, you're doing n C
Speaker 1: double a work um and and what's the next step. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so there's a guy Brittain Banowski Britain was assistant commissioner
Speaker 1: in the South Wind. He came in the same month
Speaker 1: I started as an intern at Northwestern State. Britain eventually
Speaker 1: became Conference USA and had just left a couple of
Speaker 1: years ago and now runs a college football playoff foundation.
Speaker 1: But we got to know each other in and in
Speaker 1: the fall of ninety one, he took a job as
Speaker 1: assistant commissioner with the Southwest Conference, you know, the old
Speaker 1: Texas Arkansas Conference, and uh so there was this opening
Speaker 1: and I applied and and was selected for that job.
Speaker 1: I did not have a law degree. I interviewed against
Speaker 1: two attorneys, and in the interview process they said, look,
Speaker 1: we think we need an attorney for this job. Why
Speaker 1: should we even consider you? Again? The other two candidates
Speaker 1: had law degrees, And I remember my answer star did with, Look,
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to make your own decision. You're right,
Speaker 1: I don't have a lot of green. If I can
Speaker 1: convince you don't need an attorney, I think I've got
Speaker 1: a really good chance of being your next assistant commissioner.
Speaker 1: Which was kind of just an off the coff confident statement,
Speaker 1: not arrogant, but just confident that let me explain to you,
Speaker 1: I think I'm the person for this job. So January
Speaker 1: of ninety two, we moved from Nackadis, Louisiana, to the
Speaker 1: Dallas area. Lived in planoh actually in Allen, Texas, UM
Speaker 1: and I started as assistant commissioner for the Southland Conference
Speaker 1: that that January and then Clay, like every two years,
Speaker 1: I moved up. So two years later I became associate
Speaker 1: commissioner for Championships and Marketing Brittain Mianowski Britain had come
Speaker 1: back as our commissioner um. And then two years later,
Speaker 1: when the Big Twelve is being started, Steve Hatchell was
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's inaugural commissioner. He hired Britain and I
Speaker 1: was thirty one years old, and they named me commissioner.
Speaker 1: All the presidents got together and they decided unanimously to
Speaker 1: named met commissioner of that conference without going out and
Speaker 1: doing a further search. They thought they thought they had
Speaker 1: the right person. And uh hopefully they still feel they
Speaker 1: did the right thing at that point. So you're thirty one,
Speaker 1: and that's a pretty meteoric rise, right to go from
Speaker 1: and in turn in the middle of nowhere or Louisiana
Speaker 1: and then a golf coach, and at thirty one you
Speaker 1: get named the commissioner of that conference. Were you ready
Speaker 1: for the job? I don't think you've ever ready, believe
Speaker 1: me in my current role, um, but I was. I
Speaker 1: was as prepared as you could be at thirty one
Speaker 1: years old, which is you know, that's not a very
Speaker 1: sophisticated answer. You play. What's interesting is two years earlier
Speaker 1: the job had come open and people said you should apply,
Speaker 1: and I knew inside that I wasn't ready. It wasn't
Speaker 1: my time. I actually thought, right or wrong, naively soul
Speaker 1: or just youth that when it came open again, I
Speaker 1: thought I had a shot at um at being the commissioner.
Speaker 1: I've been around the League office for four years, you know,
Speaker 1: I've done the regulatory stuff. I kind of knew the issues.
Speaker 1: I had the ability to think through what needed to
Speaker 1: be done or what shouldn't have been done, And um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was as ready as could be. You know, it
Speaker 1: was a time where like all the staff took other jobs.
Speaker 1: I mean I worked like tirelessly because it's a much
Speaker 1: smaller operation. But you still, I had high expectations of
Speaker 1: myself even in that moment. So for people who aren't
Speaker 1: familiar with that conference at that time, the schools that
Speaker 1: are in it are which ones? And uh and what
Speaker 1: you know? How much of it arranged geographically? Did you
Speaker 1: have to deal with? Sure? It was all all the Texas.
Speaker 1: All the schools at that time were either in Texas
Speaker 1: or Louisiana sou from Dallas down to San Antonio and
Speaker 1: then east through Louisiana, and we had ten when I started.
Speaker 1: One was withdrawing, so the University of North Texas withdrew
Speaker 1: at the end of that academic year. So we were
Speaker 1: own to nine and that was kind of directional schools
Speaker 1: in Louisiana plus McNee State, Nichols State, and then Stephen F.
Speaker 1: Austin sam Houston State, Southwest Texas which is now Texas State,
Speaker 1: Texas Arlington in Texas, San Antonio. So I'm thirty one
Speaker 1: years old, I've got to hire a new staff, and
Speaker 1: I have expansion put right on my my desk from
Speaker 1: day one. And uh, we added that summer. Lamar University
Speaker 1: in southeastern Louisiana went to eleven and said that's the
Speaker 1: right number. So, um, you know, we had three other
Speaker 1: universities or colleges considered, and it was one of those
Speaker 1: really good decisions for that league, but nobody stopped at
Speaker 1: eleven members. Um. But you know, to your question about
Speaker 1: where you're ready, I kind of understood the league and
Speaker 1: what would work and what wouldn't work, and and you know,
Speaker 1: two months in we made a really positive expansion decision.
Speaker 1: But I'll just tell you I was trying to figure
Speaker 1: it out as much as I was, you know, doing
Speaker 1: something based on some great knowledge that I had gained
Speaker 1: in my nine year career. Be sure to catch live
Speaker 1: editions about Kicked the coverage with Clay Travis week days
Speaker 1: at six am Eastern three am Pacific. We're talking to
Speaker 1: Greg Sanky, SEC Commissioner. You can follow him on Twitter
Speaker 1: at Greg Sanky. So thirty one years old, you're a
Speaker 1: commissioner of a conference, which a lot of people would
Speaker 1: would consider to be an incredible accomplishment by thirty one,
Speaker 1: What did your family think at this point in time,
Speaker 1: Not your wife, but your mom and dad back home
Speaker 1: in New York. Were they blown away by your success?
Speaker 1: What did they think of this? I probably found out
Speaker 1: three years later. I had the ability to buy tickets
Speaker 1: to the Final four, and I brought my brother and
Speaker 1: my brother lives in Hawaii he's younger than I am,
Speaker 1: and my parents to Tampa for the Final four, I
Speaker 1: think it was. And we're sitting like these great seats
Speaker 1: and it was a year at the University of Connecticut.
Speaker 1: One of my dad looks at me and says, I
Speaker 1: think you made the right decision, because when I told
Speaker 1: him that I wasn't gonna be an engineer. He said,
Speaker 1: you're missing the boat. You're missing the boat. As I
Speaker 1: tell you that story, I can smell to our garage
Speaker 1: where I told him, the exact spot where I had
Speaker 1: that conversation. So said, I think he made the right decision.
Speaker 1: And then I called him and there's another story I
Speaker 1: want to tell you about the South End experience and
Speaker 1: intersects with me being in the SEC. But when I
Speaker 1: called him to tell him I was leaving the Southland
Speaker 1: Commissioner's job to take an associate Commissioner's job the SEC.
Speaker 1: So why would you do that? And he's like the
Speaker 1: only person who really ever said it that way to me, Like,
Speaker 1: why would you leave a stable job? Or you're the boss?
Speaker 1: And you know that was his frame of reference that
Speaker 1: you had risen this ladder. I was paid, you know,
Speaker 1: well enough, and lived in Dallas, which was great, and
Speaker 1: UH loves that work. But you know, I was ready
Speaker 1: for that new challenge, which kind of materialized in a
Speaker 1: phone conversation with Mike's life one day in August of
Speaker 1: two thousand two. I want to get to that in
Speaker 1: a sect, but I want to go back to you
Speaker 1: telling your dad you didn't want to be an engineer,
Speaker 1: because I feel like there's a lot of people out
Speaker 1: there listening right now, especially if they're on the younger side.
Speaker 1: They may be in college out for the summer, listening
Speaker 1: to this podcast. And when you're young, a lot of
Speaker 1: what you do initially is fulfill the expectations and dreams
Speaker 1: potentially of other people, right and uh, and and I
Speaker 1: think that's probably somewhat what you were doing going and
Speaker 1: becoming an engineer was fulfilling a dream that your dad
Speaker 1: had for you. How difficult was it for you to
Speaker 1: tell him that you weren't going to do maybe what
Speaker 1: he thought you should be doing and become an engineer.
Speaker 1: My memory is enormous. Um, you know, just uh, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna tell him I'm not going to do this because
Speaker 1: I walked into a tier the way you phrase the question,
Speaker 1: I don't think I put a lot of thought into
Speaker 1: what I was going to major in. It was, hey, engineer,
Speaker 1: you make good money, You'll always have a job. I
Speaker 1: get to go to school in Texas. This is gonna
Speaker 1: be great. I want to go live in Texas and
Speaker 1: see what life's like there. And uh, you know, everything worked,
Speaker 1: But then when I had to walk through on my
Speaker 1: own what's life going to look like? UM, that's where
Speaker 1: this other conversation took place. Almost all internally. Uh, my
Speaker 1: wife and I were dating. I don't remember she and
Speaker 1: I have any deep conversations about things. I think there
Speaker 1: was a time when eventually we talked it through. But
Speaker 1: I had to walk and say, hey, Dad, I need
Speaker 1: to talk to you about something. And then I said,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't want to be an engineer. I
Speaker 1: want to work with people, which is really kind of ironic.
Speaker 1: I just couldn't see the people's side of being an engineer.
Speaker 1: Now I've got all kinds of friends with engineering degrees
Speaker 1: the lead companies or do things with people. But all
Speaker 1: I saw at that point was, you know, drawings in
Speaker 1: electrical circuits. UM. And so my my teaching and coaching
Speaker 1: was I had an uncle who taught and coached, and
Speaker 1: he like had this great looking life, drove a Camaro,
Speaker 1: which wasn't the be all end off for me in
Speaker 1: the least seventies, but you know, it's like, hey, you
Speaker 1: get to work with people. I love the competitive aspect
Speaker 1: of sports. I love playing sports. I love thinking it
Speaker 1: through and watching UM and I love the educational setting.
Speaker 1: I've never considered professional sports as a as a career
Speaker 1: path for me. It's always been in the context of education.
Speaker 1: And that's what really informed that day. I just didn't
Speaker 1: know it when when we had that conversation. But he
Speaker 1: never said no. To my dad's credit, he said, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: you're missing the boat. He didn't say you're making a mistake.
Speaker 1: I don't know what boat I missed, but he certainly
Speaker 1: did miss a boat. I will freely acknowledge that one.
Speaker 1: But I caught a caught a much better one for me.
Speaker 1: So how many hours are you working? So a lot
Speaker 1: of people want to get that initial job, they don't
Speaker 1: necessarily work that hard at it because your initial jobs
Speaker 1: they may not be great jobs, right, So, I mean,
Speaker 1: when you're grinding, it's not like you're making necessarily really
Speaker 1: important decisions or things that you think. And there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people listening now who will have been interns.
Speaker 1: I mean, you're literally the lowest man on the totem pole,
Speaker 1: so to speak. How many hours are you working as
Speaker 1: you work yourself? Yeah, in a real job, I tracked
Speaker 1: for a while because I was working. I worked all
Speaker 1: the time, and I got up to eighty hours a
Speaker 1: few weeks when we because I think people are hearing
Speaker 1: that now and they're like eighty hours as the like
Speaker 1: you think of a director of intermural sports as like
Speaker 1: kind of not a hard working job, right, I mean
Speaker 1: like for a lot of people, I think that was
Speaker 1: the one man. Yeah, so I'm showing up at ten
Speaker 1: in the morning and I'd be there till midnight. Um,
Speaker 1: so those are fourteen hour days. You do five of
Speaker 1: those or four of those, You're you're pretty far down
Speaker 1: the road, uh for eighty events, and then you have
Speaker 1: eighty hours. Then you have a few special events over
Speaker 1: the weekend and that's all you do. And I can
Speaker 1: remember thinking, man, when I when I was thinking about
Speaker 1: not being an engineer, it was because I didn't want
Speaker 1: to live my life for the weekend. I mean literally,
Speaker 1: clais that those engineering labs I think about the weekend.
Speaker 1: I'm like, this is really a rotten way to live.
Speaker 1: It's just like the Lover Boys song working for the
Speaker 1: Weekend was popular at the time. You're like, I don't
Speaker 1: want to live for the weekend. There's gonna be something
Speaker 1: that that resonates more, And all of a sudden, I
Speaker 1: get this job, and I don't even know what a
Speaker 1: weekend is because it's just constant. But you know, that
Speaker 1: prepared me. So then when I'm Conference commissioner. Um, my
Speaker 1: first year, I ended up in the hospital because I
Speaker 1: worked so much and slept so little and did an exercise.
Speaker 1: In fact, the story I was going to share one
Speaker 1: of them was I was flying here for my first
Speaker 1: meeting with Roy Kramer in the SEC office, the office
Speaker 1: that I'm sitting in as we conduct this interview, and
Speaker 1: at eight seven, I'm thirty two years old. I get
Speaker 1: off a plane in Atlanta. I go to the bathroom
Speaker 1: at Gate I mean the memories that I'm standing at
Speaker 1: the urinal, doing what one does at the urinal. I
Speaker 1: get light headed, and the next thing you know, I
Speaker 1: hear somebody saying, don't worry, sir, stay on the floor.
Speaker 1: We've called for help. And like I'm wondering who he's
Speaker 1: talking to. And I realized I'm on the bathroom floor.
Speaker 1: And one of the fundamentals in life is when you're
Speaker 1: getting up off the bathroom floor or you're never in
Speaker 1: a good spot in life. And mine wasn't like a
Speaker 1: crazy Saturday night bender or something, but I had my
Speaker 1: heart freaked out. I had a natural fibrillation and just
Speaker 1: I went down and then I almost passed out again
Speaker 1: in the airport. I'm thirty two years old and I
Speaker 1: spent a night in the hospital, and you know, I've
Speaker 1: got a four year old and a one year old
Speaker 1: and like a two dollar insurance policy on myself. And
Speaker 1: it's one of those eye opening moments about Wow, how
Speaker 1: are you going to live now? You've you've ground it
Speaker 1: as hard as you can, but you're gonna have to
Speaker 1: take care of yourself as well. Was what caused that?
Speaker 1: Was it that you were working? I mean, I don't know,
Speaker 1: and I'm enough about the condition there you faint, but
Speaker 1: was it brought on by just work? At to access?
Speaker 1: I mean, what did they tell you about how to
Speaker 1: get better? Yeah? It was well, we don't really know
Speaker 1: what triggered it, but your was a vagal nerve hopefully
Speaker 1: I say it the right you know, has a function here.
Speaker 1: And they were asking me about sleep patterns and how
Speaker 1: much caffeina I was consuming. And the best description as
Speaker 1: there's a sign feld where Kramer gets free lattes and
Speaker 1: so he's going in there all the time. And that
Speaker 1: was me. I was sleeping like four or five hours
Speaker 1: a night. I'd wake up my mind's going a hundred
Speaker 1: miles an hour at four in the morning. I'd work
Speaker 1: all day. I coached my kids soccer team at that point,
Speaker 1: and I drink like three and four lattes through the day,
Speaker 1: like the hyper caffe nation, and so uh we backed
Speaker 1: it off there started an exercise, paid a little bit
Speaker 1: more attention to nutrition, and learned that I had to
Speaker 1: rely on my staff a little bit more effectively. So
Speaker 1: do you call the SEC when you're going to that
Speaker 1: interview and say, Hey, I'm gonna have to miss it.
Speaker 1: I'm in the Atlanta hospital instead because I passed out
Speaker 1: at the urnal. Well, I wasn't here for I was
Speaker 1: here for a meeting. So one double A commissioners would
Speaker 1: go around myself, the Southern Conference Commissioner and the Big
Speaker 1: Sky Commissioner. We decided strategically we'd go see the big guy.
Speaker 1: So Roy Kramer, Jim Delaney, Gene Corgan was at the
Speaker 1: a SEC Tom Hanson and just talk about issues because
Speaker 1: we wanted to guarante TEA games, you know, the FCS
Speaker 1: games everybody complains about. So I was on the other
Speaker 1: that would make you yeah, make your budget, and um,
Speaker 1: you know we were better than Sun Belt Schools. I'll
Speaker 1: just tell you right now that when they were starting football,
Speaker 1: the Southland Schools would get three teams in the one
Speaker 1: Double A playoffs and they had a winning record at
Speaker 1: that time against Sun Belt school So there was there
Speaker 1: was some half to it, and we needed to improve
Speaker 1: the one Double A playoffs and talked about where we
Speaker 1: wanted to be friendly with them. So we were coming
Speaker 1: here for a meeting. So I literally had to call
Speaker 1: and say I'm not gonna make it. I'm spending the
Speaker 1: night in the hospital. As it turns out, that's right.
Speaker 1: When I tell the story in a room of people,
Speaker 1: I say, look, if any of you work for an
Speaker 1: airline someday, the way to begin the call is not
Speaker 1: the way it began with my wife, which is hello,
Speaker 1: Mrs Sanky, this is Mike from Delta Airlines. If you
Speaker 1: heard about your husband. And when I was hand at
Speaker 1: the phone, I'm an emergency room and they're going to
Speaker 1: administer hepperin to prevent blood clotting, is what they've told me.
Speaker 1: So I'm all freaked out about having a stroke of
Speaker 1: some sort because my heart's not clearing the blood because
Speaker 1: it's fluttering as opposed to beating. And I get this
Speaker 1: phone my wife. The first thing she said to me
Speaker 1: is what are you trying to do to me? And
Speaker 1: I'm like, I think I'm okay, here's what happened. Um,
Speaker 1: She's like, do I need to come out there. I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: it'll be fine. We'll just we'll get through this. So
Speaker 1: that was like a Tuesday. And then on Thursday, I
Speaker 1: was playing in an adult hockey league back in Dallas,
Speaker 1: and so she got a little bit riled up because
Speaker 1: I said, well, I'm gonna play because I might as
Speaker 1: well figure out if my heart's gonna freak out on me.
Speaker 1: No better place than on a hockey rink, because I've
Speaker 1: got a helmet and pads on, and uh, I've never
Speaker 1: had that problem again. Fox Sports Radio has the best
Speaker 1: sports talk lineup in the nation. Catch all of our
Speaker 1: shows at Fox sports Radio dot com and within the
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio app search f s are to listen live.
Speaker 1: Uh so you we we circle back around now we're
Speaker 1: talking by the way to Southeastern Conference Commissioner Greg Sanky.
Speaker 1: You're listening to the Winds and Lost his podcast here
Speaker 1: with Clay Travis um, you get so you're the commissioner
Speaker 1: in the south Land Conference. It is your dad's telling
Speaker 1: you got the best gig ever you're showing taking your
Speaker 1: family to the final four. And then you get an
Speaker 1: opportunity to potentially not be a commissioner anymore and go
Speaker 1: to the Southeastern Conference. How does that happen? Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: Mike Slide, if you paid attention closely to the story,
Speaker 1: Mike Slide and I are on a committee in ninety seven,
Speaker 1: are in Kansas City, and I met him once but
Speaker 1: didn't know him. We're standing off to the side and
Speaker 1: he says, well, tell me your story. So I I
Speaker 1: go through a version of what I've told you here.
Speaker 1: I want to get to the Utica College party, says
Speaker 1: Utica College. I was born and raised in Utica, New York.
Speaker 1: And I said really, And he said, where'd you live there?
Speaker 1: And so it started this conversation. A couple of years later,
Speaker 1: he said, Hey, if you ever back in Utica. Every
Speaker 1: Saturday night, my family used to heat at Joe's Restaurant.
Speaker 1: He said, here's where it is. It's on Bleaker Street.
Speaker 1: When you see it, you won't want to go in.
Speaker 1: But they make their sauce every morning. It was an
Speaker 1: Italian restaurant. So Kathy and I were we flew to Syracuse.
Speaker 1: We were driving out to Newport, Rhode Island for meetings
Speaker 1: where Mike and Liz would be attending, and I said,
Speaker 1: why don't we leave early and go have lunch at Joe's.
Speaker 1: So he did, and then I told Mike about doing it,
Speaker 1: and I've told folks I think that was the most
Speaker 1: significant decision of my career, was to go eat lunch
Speaker 1: with Joe's. It was great. It was just when he said,
Speaker 1: was like ten bucks for for a lunch of pasta
Speaker 1: and a salad and great sauce and um. So we
Speaker 1: started this conversation where you built a friendship. And about
Speaker 1: a year and a half later, he offered me a
Speaker 1: chance to work for him at Conference USA. And I
Speaker 1: didn't want to move to Chicago. I really liked kind
Speaker 1: of the leadership position I had. And then when he
Speaker 1: came here to the SEC I was, John Swofford called me.
Speaker 1: Tom Hanson, the Pack twelve commissioner, called me and Mike
Speaker 1: and said I'm gonna recommend you be the next commissioner
Speaker 1: of Conference USA. So I got in the interview process
Speaker 1: and went through a phone interview, and then like a
Speaker 1: week went by and I never heard back. So I
Speaker 1: called Mike and I said, hey, what's going on with
Speaker 1: your old job? He was here in the SEC office
Speaker 1: that I'm sitting in right now, and he said, look,
Speaker 1: I've been busy. I haven't paid any attention. And I
Speaker 1: remember Clay not believing him, like guys just kind of
Speaker 1: giving me the brush off. Once I got here and
Speaker 1: saw what it was for him, it was all complete
Speaker 1: learning experience. He was right. He hadn't thought about Conference
Speaker 1: USA at all, just because his life had been taken
Speaker 1: over by the SEC. But at the end of the
Speaker 1: conversation he said, he said, hey, by the way, I've
Speaker 1: got a job open here and would you ever think
Speaker 1: about working for the SEC? And when he tried to
Speaker 1: hire me a Conference USA, Kathy and I talked. They said,
Speaker 1: you know, if it was like the SEC calling for
Speaker 1: an associate commissioner job, I think I take the opportunity.
Speaker 1: So it kind of all this work together where he
Speaker 1: and I spent a month talking. It was back in
Speaker 1: rules compliance and there were a couple of things. One
Speaker 1: the SEC had any kind of issues. Then you know,
Speaker 1: we're always going to have issues, but I had a
Speaker 1: good reputation. I was concerned about kind of getting flattered
Speaker 1: with some of the dirt um. I didn't want to
Speaker 1: be like the enforcement guy and was just work in
Speaker 1: compliance and do rules in terms, and so I was
Speaker 1: really a struggle. People are like, you know. I talked
Speaker 1: to people and they said, I don't know why you'd
Speaker 1: want to go there and do that work. And I
Speaker 1: just got to a point where I was thirty eight,
Speaker 1: I was still young and had a fourth grade in
Speaker 1: a first grader, and I had executed a strategic plan
Speaker 1: at the Southland conference. They were pretty well positioned and
Speaker 1: I could go, like make another lap on the track.
Speaker 1: This is literally the conversation I'm having with myself. I
Speaker 1: love living in Dallas, but if I was ever going
Speaker 1: to take a challenge, you know, I was gonna you
Speaker 1: might as well take a big challenge, and trying to
Speaker 1: come here and and help in the area that that
Speaker 1: he had a job opening was a big challenge. But
Speaker 1: it came down to one of my staff, Linda Teelers,
Speaker 1: now a senior associate a d at Florida, asked me
Speaker 1: this incredibly clarifying question and for young people listening or
Speaker 1: people changing jobs. You're gonna have to get the essence
Speaker 1: of things if you're going to make a change. And
Speaker 1: she came in and she's the only one I told
Speaker 1: on my staff of the opportunity. She said, Look, if
Speaker 1: you take this job and in five years you hate it,
Speaker 1: you'll get a job back at like a one double,
Speaker 1: a school or a conference. You're you're good enough, you'll
Speaker 1: get that opportunity. But if you stay here, are you
Speaker 1: going to spend the rest of your life wondering what
Speaker 1: if I had just taken that chance? And she walked out,
Speaker 1: and I remember, you know, that's exactly right. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to live the rest of my life wondering if
Speaker 1: I could have worked at that level. Because when Kathy
Speaker 1: and I had the conversation about working in college sports,
Speaker 1: it was and I wonder how far I might go?
Speaker 1: So moved here and O two hated it. Just to
Speaker 1: be honest, it was very different. Um, you know, Mike
Speaker 1: was trying to figure it out, and uh, what did
Speaker 1: you hate about it? I had been I led a
Speaker 1: group of ten people and got to set an agenda,
Speaker 1: and when I saw problems would ask to her opinion
Speaker 1: or say, hey, why don't you go take care of
Speaker 1: it this way? And then all of a sudden, I'm
Speaker 1: just kind of listening and people are looking at me, like,
Speaker 1: why would I listen to you? You were at one
Speaker 1: double A just it was and it just wasn't comfortable
Speaker 1: for me. You know. Mike had said, hey, we'll work
Speaker 1: shoulder to shoulder on these issues, and I couldn't capture
Speaker 1: his attention because he was so busy on other things,
Speaker 1: and I felt like I was alone. So my first week,
Speaker 1: I was threatened with lawsuits over a men's tennis tournament issue,
Speaker 1: and I flew back to Dallas. My wife picks me
Speaker 1: up because I was commuting at that point. She said,
Speaker 1: what happened? I told her and she said, did you
Speaker 1: used to get threatened with lawsuits at the at the
Speaker 1: Southland conference? I said, like in six years at one time,
Speaker 1: I said, I got threatened with three lawsuits over men's tennis.
Speaker 1: I said, I can't imagine when it's at a football issue.
Speaker 1: So that started the misery. The second week was um,
Speaker 1: I forget the name of the quarterback at L s U,
Speaker 1: but Saban said he was nervous one of his brother
Speaker 1: on the sideline and we said no. I said, no,
Speaker 1: you can't do that. That's you can't take a family member,
Speaker 1: just put him on the sideline. And then the third
Speaker 1: week was my first phone call with Jim Herrick, which
Speaker 1: didn't go well because like three months later when he
Speaker 1: got fired in in February oh three. So you're dealing
Speaker 1: with all these issues. I didn't have the knowledge base
Speaker 1: to really solve problems quickly. We had some staff turnover,
Speaker 1: so I was back in that absolute grind. Um. I
Speaker 1: took a pretty significant pay cut to take the opportunity here.
Speaker 1: So you know, I said earlier that I always tried
Speaker 1: to put money in the background, and I asked myself,
Speaker 1: would I'd be moving into a situation that would challenge
Speaker 1: me so that I could learn and grow. I mean,
Speaker 1: that was the template that that I applied, and every
Speaker 1: year I asked myself the same question, like, I'm about
Speaker 1: to go through that process over the next couple of weeks,
Speaker 1: and I've got a little bit quieter time, and I
Speaker 1: still growing in the answers. Yes, uh, in this job certainly,
Speaker 1: But you know, making that move, there were just a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff and the unsettled nous and trying to
Speaker 1: figure it out that we're really really difficult. How did
Speaker 1: Nick Saban respond when you told him he couldn't have
Speaker 1: the brother on the sideline? I think that was the
Speaker 1: end of it, you know, it's it's it's interesting that
Speaker 1: that um all through the years, and you obviously have
Speaker 1: a different relationship when you're the commissioner and the coach.
Speaker 1: But Nick's always been pretty direct both ways, both you know,
Speaker 1: giving and taking, and I respect that no, no hidden
Speaker 1: gend is just very clear conversations back and forth. Be
Speaker 1: sure to catch live editions about Kicked the coverage with
Speaker 1: Clay Travis week days at six am Eastern three am Pacific.
Speaker 1: You mentioned taking a pay cut, and there are a
Speaker 1: lot of people listening right now and we're talking to
Speaker 1: SEC Commissioner Greg Sanky. This is the Wins and Losses
Speaker 1: podcast with Clay Travis. A lot of people out there would,
Speaker 1: and I think in life in general, don't make a
Speaker 1: decision because they can't bear to go back in pay right.
Speaker 1: It's very very common. I've done it a bunch of
Speaker 1: times in my career where I've thought, hey, I liked
Speaker 1: the opportunity. I did it when I decided to give
Speaker 1: up practicing law, which a lot of people you said
Speaker 1: you had the conversation with your dad. I mean a
Speaker 1: lot of people thought I was crazy, you know, graduating
Speaker 1: from Vanderbilt law school and writing a book about sec football,
Speaker 1: Like why was I not in a law firm? What
Speaker 1: was I doing with my life? And I have found
Speaker 1: that if you take the job that always offers you
Speaker 1: the most money, sometimes you maybe not even sometimes, but
Speaker 1: very often you end up trapped at some point, right,
Speaker 1: because there's always an opportunity to make a little bit
Speaker 1: more money. Were you cognizant of that, because I mean
Speaker 1: that's that's not necessarily a traditional path to go somewhere
Speaker 1: and take less money for probably a more challenging situation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was attentive to it, and you know that created
Speaker 1: some stress here. You know, the cost of living was
Speaker 1: a bit higher than Dallas. The real estate markets different
Speaker 1: um and I was good at maths, but not great
Speaker 1: at math, so you know, it was a little bit
Speaker 1: lean when I made the move. You've got a young
Speaker 1: family and you've got a way so and people you're
Speaker 1: in Birmingham, they don't think of it as being an
Speaker 1: expensive place, but it can be pretty expensive. I mean
Speaker 1: there's a lot of rich people in Birmingham. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: in Dallas for two dollars. You get a huge house
Speaker 1: for two hundred thousand dollars year, they're going to spend
Speaker 1: every weekend fixing your house. Um, and you know I
Speaker 1: didn't have that time because of the man to the job.
Speaker 1: But I think there's two keys in their one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was conscious about, Hey, I'm gonna I'm gonna take
Speaker 1: a hit monetarily in two of the most significant decisions
Speaker 1: I ever made, taking that internship. So I went was
Speaker 1: actually twenty one tho dollars that year at Utica because
Speaker 1: I had that for about a month and then left
Speaker 1: in July after getting the race down to six and
Speaker 1: then from yeah, from a hundred and seventy five down
Speaker 1: to a D to move to the SEC. So that's
Speaker 1: like a thirty three pay cut um. And then and
Speaker 1: both of those circumstances, I went back from a responsibilities,
Speaker 1: prestige title whatever. Um, you know I wasn't you know,
Speaker 1: I was an intern. So I was like writing letters
Speaker 1: and sealing envelopes and managing tickets and and uh, I
Speaker 1: was in compliance here as opposed to being a commissioner.
Speaker 1: And you know, part of the reason It was hard,
Speaker 1: as you know. I had to be reminded to put
Speaker 1: my ego uh in the drawer and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: do the job. And I actually Clay after a year
Speaker 1: and a half, had pursued an athletics director's job and
Speaker 1: was actually had accepted the athletics director's job at Colgate University.
Speaker 1: And on the morning of the press conference, I didn't
Speaker 1: sleep for two nights. I called the president university and said, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we need to cancel that press conference. So,
Speaker 1: whether it's Bobby Kremen's, Billy Donovan, whoever has done those things,
Speaker 1: I was on that list. I had to call Mike
Speaker 1: and asked for my job back here. We gotta go,
Speaker 1: we gotta go into this. So you so so you
Speaker 1: get so you're there for a year and a half
Speaker 1: and then you get an opportunity to go to Colgate
Speaker 1: back in the Northeast where you're you and your family
Speaker 1: were from. I mean that's a pretty prestigious school, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's that's a job that is a really
Speaker 1: pretty pretty I would imagine odd after job, you go
Speaker 1: through the interview process and by the way, one question
Speaker 1: before I get to there, did you ever find out
Speaker 1: why you didn't get the Conference US A job. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they said, the search consultant said, you can't handle this job.
Speaker 1: You've never been in a big enough setting into that.
Speaker 1: I was ready for that because it happened once. It's
Speaker 1: like a plimeter and get to know you for another
Speaker 1: commissioner's job. I so wait a second. What's harder to
Speaker 1: manage to get the Southland Conference basketball tournament back on
Speaker 1: ESPN after your predecessor hacked them off and they wouldn't
Speaker 1: talk to you for four years, three years? Or to
Speaker 1: schedule the Duke North Carolina and ESPN because he got
Speaker 1: the consultant works for the a SEC. Because I had
Speaker 1: to do the ladder, and I can tell you that's
Speaker 1: a lot more difficult now. Um, you know they made
Speaker 1: their decision that worked pretty well. Uh so yeah, no kidding.
Speaker 1: So okay, so you get the you're you're thinking, Okay,
Speaker 1: this this SEC thing may not be working out. You
Speaker 1: take the job. You had to go through the interview process,
Speaker 1: I imagine in order to get that job, and then
Speaker 1: are you up in like the vicinity, have to be
Speaker 1: in the in the community right to be ready to
Speaker 1: walk over to the press conference. I've gone through two interviews.
Speaker 1: I was up there with my family. I met the trustees,
Speaker 1: which are significant people like now the CEO of Formula
Speaker 1: one right now, a guy named Chase Carey was on
Speaker 1: the board. Chase inter was the primary trustee for my interview.
Speaker 1: Was like one of the top guys at Fox Murdoch
Speaker 1: right he was running direct TV at the time. We
Speaker 1: had conversation. I mean there's subtitent people. A guy named
Speaker 1: Mark Murphy was now the president of the Green Bay
Speaker 1: Packers had left the job. That's why it was open.
Speaker 1: He went to Northwestern University, so I could see go
Speaker 1: to this great university. It's about forty Colgate University is
Speaker 1: about forty miles from my family, my wife's family. My
Speaker 1: kids would get to know their grandparents, which they had
Speaker 1: had that opportunity. Um, they had just gone to the
Speaker 1: National Championship game in one double a football. Um. Their
Speaker 1: hockey team was top ten at the time. Him, So there,
Speaker 1: you know, there were some some opportunities there. And I
Speaker 1: had a friend in the Patriot League, the A d
Speaker 1: at Buck now who just described it as a great
Speaker 1: career experience. And uh, I was up there, I met
Speaker 1: the trustees. I sent my family back to Birmingham to
Speaker 1: finish school. Uh I was. I was, you know, there
Speaker 1: on my own. I didn't sleep. I was literally clear
Speaker 1: on my knees, praying God, what do I do and
Speaker 1: made the decision that I was going to have to
Speaker 1: get up in the morning. I had told Mike I
Speaker 1: was resigning the SEC membership, had been told that UM,
Speaker 1: so they wouldn't be caught off guard by the announcement
Speaker 1: on Monday. And I called him UM and said, Hey,
Speaker 1: this isn't gonna work, Mike, I really would like to
Speaker 1: stay if you'll have me back. He had been the
Speaker 1: a D at Cornell and it kind of advised me
Speaker 1: that wasn't the high point for him. And you know,
Speaker 1: he said, you know, you've done something that I didn't do,
Speaker 1: which was to walk away from the situation that didn't
Speaker 1: didn't work. And then I had to call the college,
Speaker 1: the university president and say, you know, you need to
Speaker 1: cancel the press conference. And then I just shut my
Speaker 1: phone off for like six hours. I told my wife
Speaker 1: and it was it was emotional for her because she thought,
Speaker 1: you know, we were wanted to take the job. Well,
Speaker 1: we had walked through this process for a couple of
Speaker 1: months where it was like, this is the right thing
Speaker 1: to do. And then all of a sudden, I call
Speaker 1: up on a Monday morning at six thirty am and say, hey,
Speaker 1: we're not moving and here's here's why. And then I
Speaker 1: just shut my phone off and just went away and
Speaker 1: I sat by the lake and and just kind of processed.
Speaker 1: And it was an important moment for my success here
Speaker 1: because I said, you know what, I haven't let myself
Speaker 1: enjoy the job. I was so uptight about going into
Speaker 1: the coaches meetings or what was the next issue. I said,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go have fun and I want to walk
Speaker 1: into the football coaches meeting in destined. So this was
Speaker 1: oh four, and I'm gonna make everybody in that room
Speaker 1: smile at least once and just have fun um. And
Speaker 1: it was a turning point for me here. I I
Speaker 1: began to enjoy the work a lot more, appreciated the level,
Speaker 1: the intensity, uh and the people in a whole fresh way.
Speaker 1: So what was it at Colgate that, ultimately do you
Speaker 1: think attributed to you not sleeping for two nights? Like it?
Speaker 1: Was it just a career trajectory? Was it? What was
Speaker 1: it that sort of in the back of your mind
Speaker 1: you were like, this is just not right. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was an accumulation of things I should have pulled out
Speaker 1: two or three weeks earlier. I was kind of told
Speaker 1: here's how salary conversations would go, and I had reasonable expectations,
Speaker 1: and I had taken the pay cut to come to
Speaker 1: the SEC, so I was looking to make a step
Speaker 1: forward and it didn't play out just mechanically the way
Speaker 1: it had been explained to me, and that was a
Speaker 1: warning flag. Um. We made a visit up there where
Speaker 1: they're going to let us live in a in some
Speaker 1: campus housing that I had certain expectations on my family
Speaker 1: would live, not overly, you know, elite, but we weren't
Speaker 1: even close to what we saw that day. It was
Speaker 1: really a shock and my wife and kids are looking
Speaker 1: at me, like, I don't think we're going to really
Speaker 1: live here in a great have a great experience. Um,
Speaker 1: we walked into school was a bit of a disaster,
Speaker 1: and there was kind of a blip and a budget circumstance,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, wait a second, If if this is
Speaker 1: the way it is now when they're happy with me,
Speaker 1: what happens after a few years when they're a little
Speaker 1: bit tired of seeing the a d roll in and
Speaker 1: probably just came to my senses to what I should
Speaker 1: have seen three weeks ago. But I wanted it to work, UM,
Speaker 1: and it was a really good lesson for me, and
Speaker 1: some other opportunities that I that I didn't pursue or
Speaker 1: stopped at the right time, And I think everybody has
Speaker 1: to go through those, you know, kintting to your point
Speaker 1: about transitioning from a law firm, Well, then you you
Speaker 1: get into something right and you learn a little bit
Speaker 1: so that the next time you have an opportunity, you
Speaker 1: know a little bit better how to discern whether it's
Speaker 1: a yes or no, or what questions to ask. And
Speaker 1: UM colgates a great place. They have had great success.
Speaker 1: The men's basketball team gave Tennessee a tough, tough game
Speaker 1: in the n c A Tournament. But it just wasn't
Speaker 1: the right situation for me, even though I thought for
Speaker 1: months that it would be. So then you go back
Speaker 1: to the SEC and basically say, I'm going to commit
Speaker 1: myself to this job. When did you start thinking, hey,
Speaker 1: maybe one day I could be the successor to Mike's
Speaker 1: alive or were you thinking that from the moment you
Speaker 1: first started working at the SEC. No I came here
Speaker 1: with the idea I could go to the Sun Belt
Speaker 1: or Conference U s A or the Mid American Conference.
Speaker 1: Things had changed where you weren't going to jump. It
Speaker 1: didn't seem from one double A into a one A situation,
Speaker 1: or from FCS to FBS and and so. Um in
Speaker 1: like oh nine, the Mid American Conference Commissioner's job came
Speaker 1: open and I went through that process, had a great
Speaker 1: visit with the search committee, and UM it was in March.
Speaker 1: I thought that was the opportunity. I've been invited back
Speaker 1: as one of two finalists, and they wanted me to
Speaker 1: sign a memoranum of understanding before I could go to
Speaker 1: the final interview. And in the Colgate situation that had
Speaker 1: come up, and I never signed the memorandum, and then
Speaker 1: I was able to walk away. And so I said, look,
Speaker 1: there were some financial things I needed clarity on and
Speaker 1: I just said, I'm not going to sign an m
Speaker 1: o U. It hadn't been presented to me by the
Speaker 1: search firm upfront. I said, I'll go into the interview,
Speaker 1: but if if somebody's like really unpleasant to me in
Speaker 1: the interview process. UMA, he was saying that you would
Speaker 1: accept the job if it got offered to you and
Speaker 1: they're asking. I mean, that's part of some search firms
Speaker 1: function that way. And so I said, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to sign the m o U and kind of we
Speaker 1: went back and forth probably forty eight hours, and UM,
Speaker 1: it's probably the one time where I said, you know,
Speaker 1: there was it's a pretty good salary jump for where
Speaker 1: I was and and talked it through here and got
Speaker 1: a little bit more and and maybe Clay, that was
Speaker 1: the first time I ever thought about, UM, you know
Speaker 1: what happens when when Mike Slive decides to step away
Speaker 1: and he and I, uh, just a conversation about, Hey,
Speaker 1: one of the reasons I'm thinking about going to the
Speaker 1: Mid American Conference is you know, you'll work five more
Speaker 1: years or so, and then i'd be a candidate as
Speaker 1: opposed to being an internal candidate, potentially having multiple internal candidates.
Speaker 1: And UM encouraged me to rethink that, and I did,
Speaker 1: and you know, the rest is history, as they say,
Speaker 1: But it wasn't quite this easy a decision in the moment,
Speaker 1: all right. So while you're at the SEC working there,
Speaker 1: what would you say your expertise became on a day
Speaker 1: to day basis you would, I'm sure take care of
Speaker 1: a lot of different things. But what did you find
Speaker 1: as you kind of found your footing after you came
Speaker 1: back from that Colligate job, was sort of your wheelhouse
Speaker 1: that you think you contributed to most of the conference end? Wow,
Speaker 1: that's like, uh, that's a question. You know. I had
Speaker 1: this regulatory compliance legislative role and threw myself into what
Speaker 1: I think it was pretty good at what was hand,
Speaker 1: what was what was happening nationally in that that regard
Speaker 1: and being ahead of it, but also thinking of and
Speaker 1: understanding what was happening on our campus that I still
Speaker 1: think I understand, not um at the level of detail
Speaker 1: if I lived on one of our campuses, but I
Speaker 1: know how our people think, and that is an asset
Speaker 1: um and that's one that comes with having now been
Speaker 1: here for sixteen and a half years. UM. And then
Speaker 1: I think, um, I say this with a level of humility.
Speaker 1: I think I was of more benefit to Mike than
Speaker 1: I understood at the time because he gave me permission
Speaker 1: to be just completely honest with him, and I was
Speaker 1: good at playing that role, not because of anything in particular,
Speaker 1: maybe just personality to say, hey, did you think about
Speaker 1: it this way, and he tell me I have and
Speaker 1: I'm going this direction or that's a really bad suggestion. Um.
Speaker 1: But UM, you know, from my perspective, we had a
Speaker 1: really really effective working relationship. What was it like during expansion?
Speaker 1: So you you end up adding Missouri and Texas, A
Speaker 1: and M. I'm guessing that's probably by far the craziest
Speaker 1: time in your time in the SEC office. Would that
Speaker 1: be fair to say? What was that process like from
Speaker 1: your perspective? Yeah? I think um that the year before
Speaker 1: people forget the two thousand and ten was when the
Speaker 1: Pack ten looked at becoming the Pack six team. Right,
Speaker 1: they were going to add Texas, they were going to
Speaker 1: add A and M Oklahoma, Okahoma State and all those
Speaker 1: teams from the Big twelve. Yeah, and expansion among us
Speaker 1: all was relatively quiet at that time, and then it
Speaker 1: just kind of goes and how do we respond? You know,
Speaker 1: we weren't the recruits like everyone else was. Um, and
Speaker 1: twelve worked worked really well. We had just gone through
Speaker 1: a TV renegotiation in two thousand and eight that was
Speaker 1: beneficial with the huge expansion in ESPN revenue, the continuity
Speaker 1: with CBS, and so then eleven comes and it was
Speaker 1: first A and M as people recall, and and yeah,
Speaker 1: there was just a level of intensity around that experience
Speaker 1: from what August into September when it was announced, and
Speaker 1: then on the other side of the announcement was scheduling
Speaker 1: for a thirteen league team, which we were prepared to
Speaker 1: be come and then the Missouri edition in November kind
Speaker 1: of after you've had some of these thirteen team plans settled.
Speaker 1: At the same time, there's this network talk that was
Speaker 1: in the background that was bubbling uh um. And you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: there was an intensity, but then I think the intensity
Speaker 1: ramped up after expansion because you had the need to schedule,
Speaker 1: to orient, to learn, to to accommodate it. Just also
Speaker 1: you've got meetings with two new two universities represented. They're
Speaker 1: learning you, you're learning them, uh and you know, now
Speaker 1: we're into twelve and so the the network idea which
Speaker 1: had been there in oh seven oh eight but not
Speaker 1: you know pursued, is now now has new life. And
Speaker 1: you know, your work from expansion into transition and then
Speaker 1: into how to to launch a conference network. So those
Speaker 1: were really uh set of intense years where you never
Speaker 1: had a business as usual experience. How does schools reach
Speaker 1: out when you know when conference realignment is going on.
Speaker 1: Is that's something where you've got a friend who is
Speaker 1: who is in a school and he calls you up
Speaker 1: and it's like, hey, would you be interested if this
Speaker 1: possibility came out? Like how do you become aware of
Speaker 1: what your options are and the contacts are because it's
Speaker 1: a complex process, right, I mean, nobody wants It's like,
Speaker 1: you don't want to try to get into a conference
Speaker 1: until you know they'll have you. But how do you
Speaker 1: know whether conference can have you? I'm fascinated by the
Speaker 1: whole process by which that takes place. That's formula is
Speaker 1: locked in a fall behind steel doors with secret combinations
Speaker 1: that only I know and so you know it's it varies,
Speaker 1: I think because you really looked across the landscape, so
Speaker 1: you look at at the PACT ten experience that were
Speaker 1: consultants involved outreach ours or people were people calling here
Speaker 1: or intermediaries just said hey, they'd be interested, And obviously
Speaker 1: there's a lot of care. Uh, Missouri and Texas, A
Speaker 1: and M or both members of the American Association Universities
Speaker 1: prestigious research universities or in contiguous states fan bases that
Speaker 1: are similar with metropolitan areas, so there are very few
Speaker 1: who really fit that. But we were never the recruiting
Speaker 1: entity in those processes, and in at least in the
Speaker 1: eleven time frame. How do you deal with leaks like
Speaker 1: that still exists now that you're the commissioner of the conference.
Speaker 1: But I remember and I'm sure you do as well.
Speaker 1: The news officially came out when the SEC accidentally had
Speaker 1: a staged page right on for Missouri announcing that Missouri
Speaker 1: was going to be fourteenth member of the SEC, And
Speaker 1: somebody sent that to me and I remember writing about
Speaker 1: it and being like, oh, this is amazing. But it
Speaker 1: had quotes from you know, a bunch of different people,
Speaker 1: like it was seton, ready to roll. But how do
Speaker 1: you know, you know when there's when there's that much interest,
Speaker 1: right and for people who don't remember listening to us
Speaker 1: right now, I mean, realignment was absolute fever, pitch crazy.
Speaker 1: It combines act, you know, business, uh, politics certainly uh
Speaker 1: the money aside, the conference growth, everything. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is as big of a story as you can get.
Speaker 1: How do you handle something like that? Well? Very carefully? So, like,
Speaker 1: how many people do you think the leak is? Well,
Speaker 1: Mike Mike was one of the things I learned a
Speaker 1: lot from working with one of those great privileges of
Speaker 1: my career. You know, for me personally, there are two
Speaker 1: things that really helped me. One, I was in charge
Speaker 1: of a conference and so you realize how different is
Speaker 1: to be the decision maker at the end of the hall,
Speaker 1: even in a small setting. And the second one was
Speaker 1: just to work with him and see how he functioned.
Speaker 1: And you know, you're you're gonna be protective of information.
Speaker 1: I've forgotten about that web page piece. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: pretty good memory. That's that brought shock to my face. Um,
Speaker 1: but action when you see that the Missouri joining the
Speaker 1: SEC web page has leaked, as you said it, I'm
Speaker 1: recalling somebody came into my office because, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: at that time, I was an associate commissioner. I had
Speaker 1: not been named the chief operating Officer. My title hadn't
Speaker 1: bumped up, so I had a role, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: like what it became. And I'm like you, you're you've
Speaker 1: got to be kidding me. How does that happen? And
Speaker 1: you know you kind of stayed away from Mike's office
Speaker 1: at that point in the day to let kind of
Speaker 1: whatever whatever fure or you know, be delivered where it
Speaker 1: needed to be delivered, and then I'd come kind of
Speaker 1: clean it up. It's um. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: there are things that are reported where you're like, that's
Speaker 1: not true. I once sat behind an Army general reading
Speaker 1: USA today in an n c A meeting, and I said,
Speaker 1: you know, in athletics we have these things are leaked
Speaker 1: or anonymous sources say, and you're like, half of it's
Speaker 1: just wrong. I said, what's it like in the military.
Speaker 1: Is during the the original desert storm? He said, oh,
Speaker 1: it's the same thing. So you know, we have to
Speaker 1: be careful because, especially in the Southeastern Conference, there's so
Speaker 1: much interest in what we do that it is um.
Speaker 1: You know, you lose opportunities, you can lose value. Uh,
Speaker 1: you can lose options if it all plays out in
Speaker 1: the media. And we just walked through this discussion of
Speaker 1: alcohol that went on for a long period of time
Speaker 1: this past year, and we had a working group look
Speaker 1: at it. But I'd say continually to our membership, if
Speaker 1: you want to debate this in the newspapers, all that
Speaker 1: will do is harden people's positions on both ends. And
Speaker 1: if we want to work through this collaboratively. We have
Speaker 1: to do it without leaks and anonymous sources. And you know,
Speaker 1: we were pretty good for about fifty one weeks there
Speaker 1: before it became a topic as we had it into destined,
Speaker 1: which we knew it would become. And and really the
Speaker 1: essence of your question is, you know, how do you
Speaker 1: react to to leaks? How do you deal with it?
Speaker 1: You know, you try to manage it up front, not
Speaker 1: because you're trying to be deceitful or overly protected, but
Speaker 1: because you have to have room and freedom in space
Speaker 1: to do the work of the conference. So Mike's live,
Speaker 1: you had the expansion occur, and then he tells you
Speaker 1: when did you become aware that he was planning on
Speaker 1: stepping down? Did he call you into his office and
Speaker 1: tell you? What was that process like for you? Well,
Speaker 1: remember Mike, Mike's prostate cancer reared up in a really,
Speaker 1: really dramatic way in the summer of fourteen UM. And
Speaker 1: I think it's probably in September UM where he and
Speaker 1: I were on his back porch, a place he loved,
Speaker 1: where I really understood, um the gravity of the situation,
Speaker 1: and I had had another opportunity of substance present itself
Speaker 1: in college athletics and all of a sudden, you know,
Speaker 1: a guide to whom I'm loyal, a conference that's been
Speaker 1: a good place for me. Um, it's a little bit undefined.
Speaker 1: And remember this is the summer of two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: so we're launching a network. You know, distribution as a question,
Speaker 1: UM as you go into July, and then things started
Speaker 1: to break right around Media Days with Comcast. We had
Speaker 1: Dish and a t tu Verse up front direct barely
Speaker 1: before the actual direct TV came on that night, which
Speaker 1: is what I have. So we were fully distributed, with
Speaker 1: the exception of what was then Cable Vision in New
Speaker 1: York City and we're now on its success or Altis UM.
Speaker 1: So he had that like what's going to happen. You
Speaker 1: had the launch of the network and game scheduled differently
Speaker 1: is an we're gonna watch sec Nation. And then then
Speaker 1: Mike just had this this health reality and you know,
Speaker 1: in retirement. I think what he had said had been
Speaker 1: on his mind during that summer for the next year,
Speaker 1: and UM, that announcement came out in October that he
Speaker 1: would be retiring, and you know he's going through that
Speaker 1: chemo battle just as tough as nails. He had a uh,
Speaker 1: you know, just watching those treatments and and what it
Speaker 1: would do and people who have had you know, friends
Speaker 1: or family members with our colleagues fight cancer, no know
Speaker 1: how hard that battle could be, but just a spirit
Speaker 1: that was remarkable to watch. And then for me in October,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, I became like the number one
Speaker 1: ranked team in the country. I was kidding with Calipari
Speaker 1: because that your Kentucky went through undefeated until the Semish
Speaker 1: nationally and so people say, well, it's gonna be Greg
Speaker 1: Sanky and that was never the deal. You know. Nick
Speaker 1: Zeppos was the chair of our Presidents and Chancellors, and
Speaker 1: he was great to say, we're gonna go through a
Speaker 1: full search. That's in the best interest of the conference,
Speaker 1: and frankly, that's the right thing for you. A lot
Speaker 1: of people think highly of you. You'll be a candidate.
Speaker 1: And then it was a really intense I'm a preparation,
Speaker 1: like how do you see this conference in the future,
Speaker 1: And so I had my day job to do. We
Speaker 1: all shared a little bit more because we wanted to
Speaker 1: make sure Mike was well supported and his schedule was
Speaker 1: different as as he went through his his health battle
Speaker 1: and then I was trying to repair materials and how
Speaker 1: do you communicate about the future of the Southeastern Conference?
Speaker 1: And it was like the posture or the question to
Speaker 1: me was how do you take the SEC to the
Speaker 1: next level? And I like, I like process that for
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks because I've always thought of us
Speaker 1: as being the next level. You know, we want to
Speaker 1: be the Jones is that the people are keeping up with.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's not just easy to say, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna do this, We're gonna do that. You can't
Speaker 1: control competitive outcomes or TV contracts are set. So how
Speaker 1: do you think in a big picture way about the SEC?
Speaker 1: And that became every waking moment where I wasn't on
Speaker 1: the job, was me with an orange note book talking
Speaker 1: to people thinking about ideas. You know, where my kind
Speaker 1: of pitch came was literally on a Southwest airlized flight,
Speaker 1: writing ideas out on napkins because I forgot my arms notebook.
Speaker 1: Um that eventually formed the presentation I made during the
Speaker 1: interview process. And you see on our championship sign and
Speaker 1: some of the words about scholars, champions and leaders just
Speaker 1: conveying that here's what we're trying to do as a league.
Speaker 1: Uh and if we do it well, we're going to
Speaker 1: have TV contracts and interest in viewership and and fans
Speaker 1: attending games. Um So that that probably I just veered
Speaker 1: from the essence of the question, Clay, But that's it
Speaker 1: was a year of you know, concern for a friend
Speaker 1: first and foremost, but also recognition that, Okay, here's your opportunity.
Speaker 1: You don't want to go into that interview wondering if
Speaker 1: I've done everything I could to prepare and uh so
Speaker 1: I spent a lot of time thinking, preparing for what
Speaker 1: might be next. Where were you when you found out
Speaker 1: that you got the job? I was in Nashville, Um
Speaker 1: there were I went through three interviews in person interviews,
Speaker 1: the last with all of our presidents and chancellors. It
Speaker 1: was at the formal residence of the Vanderbilt chancellor. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, they have to have a place that that
Speaker 1: is you know, hospitality related all that. So I went
Speaker 1: to an interview on a Thursday morning at like at
Speaker 1: eight o'clock for they grill you. Anybody can ask any question.
Speaker 1: Is it structured? What's that process? Like? Yeah, I was saying,
Speaker 1: you know, they probably know. I was sitting on a
Speaker 1: couch and and everybody got to ask questions one after
Speaker 1: the other, and the couch it was an older couch.
Speaker 1: I remember sitting up high. I have a picture on
Speaker 1: my phone and their fourteen presidents and chancellors on chairs
Speaker 1: surrounding me in a in a semi circle. And it
Speaker 1: was kind of one question after another. And then we
Speaker 1: had breakfast together where there's more questions in a you know,
Speaker 1: a little bit less formal setting. And then I left.
Speaker 1: I went back to the Renaissance downtown and uh, I
Speaker 1: was kind of processing what had just happened. And I
Speaker 1: went into a meeting because I had to go back
Speaker 1: at noon for the formal regular meeting of our presidents
Speaker 1: and chancellors. So it's about ten thirty I go back.
Speaker 1: I walk in. Mike text me what's going on? And uh,
Speaker 1: I said, hey, I'm back in the hotel, like where
Speaker 1: are you? And so he's asking me questions. I walked
Speaker 1: into this room of colleagues. People kind of knew what
Speaker 1: was going on, but they did a really good job
Speaker 1: our presidents of keeping matters confidential. And I felt like
Speaker 1: dead man walking, or like what's what's happening, And so
Speaker 1: I kind of assumed if it was me, it would
Speaker 1: happen quickly and I'd get a phone call, and then
Speaker 1: like an hour goes by and there's no phone call, like, wow,
Speaker 1: this is this is interesting. I then had to get
Speaker 1: back in a car and ride back out to the
Speaker 1: same location for our formal, regular business meeting of a
Speaker 1: president's and chancellors hadn't heard a think, and Mike was
Speaker 1: in the passengers seat and his executive assistant now who
Speaker 1: works as my executive assistant, was driving, and I'm in
Speaker 1: the back and in a pretty good mood. I'm like, hey,
Speaker 1: I did the best I could. We'll see what happens.
Speaker 1: And I kind of went on a downward spiral of man,
Speaker 1: if I don't get this, you know what's going to happen.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go on the next part of my career,
Speaker 1: and like the dark clouds started to hover. And Claire
Speaker 1: I told that story like six months later. Her Vinson,
Speaker 1: our Associate Commissioner for Communication, said how I was in
Speaker 1: the back seat with you and I'm like, seriously, you were.
Speaker 1: He's like, yeah, I wrote in that same car out
Speaker 1: to that meeting, like her, but I don't remember you
Speaker 1: being there at all on that ride because your mind
Speaker 1: just kind of takes over. And so we pull up.
Speaker 1: I looked at Catherine, who would helped administratively with the search.
Speaker 1: I said, what am I supposed to do? And she said,
Speaker 1: I don't know, And so it's one of those moments
Speaker 1: where you decide who you are, and I said, you
Speaker 1: know what, I did the best I could. I walked
Speaker 1: up the stairs with my head held high, and Nick's
Speaker 1: eppos comes out and says, Greg, come with me and
Speaker 1: brings me in a side room with a couple of
Speaker 1: other presidents and chancellors. I sit down and he says, congratulations,
Speaker 1: we want you to be our next commissioner, and like
Speaker 1: the world changed, and he kind of talked about structure
Speaker 1: of agreement, and then he said, what do you think?
Speaker 1: And the first thing I said was I just need
Speaker 1: a moment to tie my shoe. My shoe had come untied,
Speaker 1: and I had some things that I wanted to talk through,
Speaker 1: but I had needed to stop the world from spinning
Speaker 1: as quickly as they had become spinning. So did you
Speaker 1: think did you think they might tell you that you
Speaker 1: weren't going to get the job. When they pulled you
Speaker 1: into the side room, then yeah, I walked down the
Speaker 1: hallway with no idea what was about to happen. Um,
Speaker 1: and I credit it wasn't any fun, but um, it
Speaker 1: was a very thorough search. I mean it was interviewed
Speaker 1: other people that day too, sure as there were other finalists.
Speaker 1: I know. Yeah, it was you know, the Jet Hughes
Speaker 1: and and it was just involved in the big ten search.
Speaker 1: Jed led this search for corn Ferry, and that's a
Speaker 1: big time company and they involve all kinds of people.
Speaker 1: That's their jobs. So and that's what our presidents and
Speaker 1: chancellors wanted for their consideration. So how much so I
Speaker 1: remember talking to you soon after you got that um,
Speaker 1: and you said, almost immediately as you rise up to
Speaker 1: that level, you realize how much difference there was between
Speaker 1: being the number two guy and being the number one guy.
Speaker 1: You know, in other words, let's say your number two
Speaker 1: to Mike Slide at that point that the distance between
Speaker 1: number one and number two geographically may not have been
Speaker 1: very much in terms of your office and moving down
Speaker 1: the hall and everything else, but how much difference was
Speaker 1: there and how much difference did you suddenly have. I
Speaker 1: feel like, this is a long question, but you don't
Speaker 1: know what it's like to be a parent until you
Speaker 1: actually become a parent, and then you go back and
Speaker 1: you tell your own parents, like, you know what, you
Speaker 1: guys did a pretty good job, right, I mean, that's
Speaker 1: the ideal scenario. But you always kind of know what
Speaker 1: the process of being a kid is like. Could you
Speaker 1: have prepared what was it like to suddenly come the
Speaker 1: commissioner of the sec um? Yeah. So, as I gather
Speaker 1: thoughts and really answering that question, Mark Ricks as he
Speaker 1: left Georgia made an observation that's very simple. He says,
Speaker 1: you don't know what it's like to sit in the
Speaker 1: chair until you sit in the chair. And and that's
Speaker 1: the answer to your question, which is I was fifty
Speaker 1: yards from this this office as executive Associate Commissioner, but
Speaker 1: I was fifty thous miles away as far as rigor
Speaker 1: and focus and pressure and expectations. And I was as
Speaker 1: close to Mike as you could be on a day
Speaker 1: to day basis, but still didn't have the level of
Speaker 1: understanding of what it's really like. And you don't have
Speaker 1: that until you're in it. The advantage that I had
Speaker 1: for myself is a lot of what happened starting June one,
Speaker 1: where people come to you with ideas and then you
Speaker 1: have to make a decision is mentally I lived through
Speaker 1: that in the Southland conference. I'm off Broadway. I can
Speaker 1: make decisions that maybe could be highly criticized. They weren't
Speaker 1: because there just wasn't the visibility. But the mental process
Speaker 1: of listening to input and then making a decision is
Speaker 1: very different from being an advisor. And that's what happens
Speaker 1: when you go from to our associate commissioner to commissioner,
Speaker 1: as you went from being an advisor to being the
Speaker 1: decision maker and Clay, that's just that's a world world
Speaker 1: of difference. And you know, for me, we had some
Speaker 1: TV allocations that hit me in the first week. The
Speaker 1: second week there is um the tragic shooting in Charleston,
Speaker 1: South Carolina, and a flood of questions here about the
Speaker 1: Confederate battle flag display in South Carolina and the state
Speaker 1: flag of Mississippi. And then what are you gonna say publicly?
Speaker 1: You know, there's not a master's class that prepares you
Speaker 1: for those experiences, and those are like two of the
Speaker 1: quick ones. But then budget decisions personnel decisions. Um, you
Speaker 1: can have a play in, which is what I worked on.
Speaker 1: But then you know, it's kind of the Mike Tyson.
Speaker 1: Everybody has a plan, utility get punched in the face.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to do all this in the first year,
Speaker 1: and I probably got through half of what I thought
Speaker 1: i'd get through, just because you know, the day to
Speaker 1: day takes over as well. Be sure to catch live
Speaker 1: editions about kick the Coverage with Clay Travis week days
Speaker 1: at six am Eastern three am Pacific. We're talking to
Speaker 1: SEC Commissioner Greg Sanky. You can follow him on Twitter
Speaker 1: at Greg Sanky. This is Wins and Lost his podcast
Speaker 1: with Clay Travis. So you get the job. Um, and
Speaker 1: you are and and I'm fortunate to know you. I
Speaker 1: think pretty well. You're forward thinking, right, You're trying to
Speaker 1: think about not just the things that are going on
Speaker 1: right now, but also the things that might come in
Speaker 1: the future. And I remember having conversations when I wrote
Speaker 1: and talked some with Mike's Live about how he sort
Speaker 1: of viewed the SEC as a public trust right. You're
Speaker 1: trying to think about things that are going to leave
Speaker 1: that conference in better shape in the years and decades
Speaker 1: ahead than it was when when you took over. How
Speaker 1: much time now do you spend thinking about the day
Speaker 1: to day mechanics of running a conference versus decisions now
Speaker 1: that you want to make that are going to be
Speaker 1: putting the conference in a better shape five to ten
Speaker 1: years in the future. What on a day to day
Speaker 1: basis now? What is your focus? It's more down the road.
Speaker 1: There's always going to be operational elements UM in in
Speaker 1: a leadership kind of chief executive officer position. My first summer,
Speaker 1: one of the things I was encouraged to do by
Speaker 1: our presidents and chancellors is to go engage with the
Speaker 1: leadership consulting program of some sort, and I ended up
Speaker 1: with Deloitte Consulting has a CEO transition program that usually
Speaker 1: is about fortune five CEO, but it's about clarity of
Speaker 1: your vision focus UM And part of that question was
Speaker 1: really what they asked me, which is how much time
Speaker 1: do you spend on strategy and operations versus vision and
Speaker 1: planning and the challenges to move to vision and planning,
Speaker 1: so you're always looking you're looking forward, and when you're
Speaker 1: an internal candidate, you've been dealing with operations. Right for
Speaker 1: you know years and you have to move away from that. Well,
Speaker 1: that takes a little bit of time. If you're an
Speaker 1: external person, you know nothing about the operations, so you're
Speaker 1: learning that and you may even have CEO experience. So
Speaker 1: I don't. I actually like the internal part because I
Speaker 1: could get after some of the immediate needs as opposed
Speaker 1: to having to figure it out for a couple of years. UM.
Speaker 1: I spend more time now looking down the road. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know five years and I've spent time after my
Speaker 1: first or second year trying to engage in more learning
Speaker 1: about what is the future really look like? Be a
Speaker 1: media be it trying to understand litigation outcomes, be at
Speaker 1: what's happening in higher education enrollment patterns, economically in our region, UM.
Speaker 1: You know, understanding chan ages and culture around media consumption
Speaker 1: of an attendance. UM. And you know, there are a
Speaker 1: set of issues that just in the last four years
Speaker 1: looked very different than they did again June one, when
Speaker 1: I started my first day in this role. And you
Speaker 1: can't spend your day just trying to figure out your
Speaker 1: arc chart. UM, you better be thinking about what it
Speaker 1: is that's around the corner, even though we can't see it.
Speaker 1: One of those that's been wildly successful is the SEC network.
Speaker 1: I mean, you guys hit it out of the park
Speaker 1: on the launch. You guys in ESPN put it together
Speaker 1: about as well as it possibly could have gone. No
Speaker 1: one missed any games, there was no disruption in the
Speaker 1: SEC fan base. You thought you might have to fight
Speaker 1: a battle, but it ended up that you just had
Speaker 1: to line up and execute a great business plan. But
Speaker 1: the challenge that you have now is SEC network has
Speaker 1: got cord cutting issues, just like ESPN and FS one
Speaker 1: and NBC Sports Network and every other cable channel out there. Now,
Speaker 1: are you concerned at all about the cable bundle in
Speaker 1: a way that maybe you didn't think you would have
Speaker 1: had to be. I don't know. I'm attentive to the
Speaker 1: cable bundle, but there are still advantages that seem to
Speaker 1: be inherent. Um, but there's there's there's clearly some point
Speaker 1: out there, this tipping point, it seems, where there's so
Speaker 1: much either direct consumer or skinny bundle or these new
Speaker 1: providers and the in and out ability that it raises
Speaker 1: the issue I think first of connection to your fan base.
Speaker 1: I think even more than content, the content has to
Speaker 1: be great. Live events are important, but keeping our our
Speaker 1: conference relevant, making sure our fans are a part of
Speaker 1: what we do and can access our games and our events.
Speaker 1: I think all of that's important to kind of feed
Speaker 1: what we've built. And sure there are changing dynamics around
Speaker 1: media and television, but you know, there's a big picture
Speaker 1: of if people are connected to what we do and
Speaker 1: it's compelling and and it's in the competition is at
Speaker 1: a high, high level, it continues to attract people. Now,
Speaker 1: how that's delivered is part of the execution where we
Speaker 1: need great partners like we've had executing well. And you've
Speaker 1: got ESPN as a great partner that's lined up for
Speaker 1: a long time with the SEC Network, the SEC Game
Speaker 1: of the Week on CBS has turned into a also
Speaker 1: wildly popular television platform. Um, and you guys have been
Speaker 1: with CBS for a long time. It's I think that
Speaker 1: deal is up. You'll know better than me in Ish
Speaker 1: football season, I think, do you already now we're talking
Speaker 1: and I hope people are still listening to this year's
Speaker 1: from now, but it's twenty nineteen. Now do you look
Speaker 1: ahead and already start planning out what might make sense there?
Speaker 1: Do you think about direct a consumer on your Game
Speaker 1: of the Week, your SEC Championship game. Is that one
Speaker 1: of the things that you would explore as part of
Speaker 1: that process kind of looking forward, I have a long
Speaker 1: view of that next opportunity, so that that CBS relationship
Speaker 1: has been enormously important to the Southeastern Conference and can
Speaker 1: continue to be. We do have five more full seasons
Speaker 1: remaining UM and appreciate that relationship. But to your earlier question,
Speaker 1: I look out in the future, UH, and that's why
Speaker 1: we engaged a media advisor, so Chuck Gerber, who did
Speaker 1: great work for us in our prior negotiations and oh
Speaker 1: eight and the launch of the SEC network. We lost
Speaker 1: Chuck in November of two thousand fifteen, so we've needed,
Speaker 1: UH someone to fill that advisory role. I don't have
Speaker 1: anything imminent, but I want to be thinking again long term,
Speaker 1: how does the industry change? Who who was involved in
Speaker 1: in in negotiations right now? That understands the business and
Speaker 1: that's why UH. In November of last year, we announced
Speaker 1: a relationship with Evolution Media and c A Television to
Speaker 1: help us in that thinking of preparation. But that's very
Speaker 1: much a long view of the opportunity that Hey, it
Speaker 1: will be out there at some point in the next
Speaker 1: five years, and we want to make sure we're as
Speaker 1: well prepared as anyone. One of the things I'm sure
Speaker 1: that's impressed you about being the SEC Commissioner is suddenly,
Speaker 1: if you didn't already know, the number of people and
Speaker 1: meetings you can get in for. And I know you've met,
Speaker 1: for instance, with Tim Cook, who's a big Auburn supporter,
Speaker 1: who were some of the names and and people that
Speaker 1: you have met who have SEC alumni relationships who cared
Speaker 1: deeply about the results of you know, college conference football, basketball, baseball,
Speaker 1: whatever it may be. Uh that that may be surprised you,
Speaker 1: And uh, I imagine it's got to be a little
Speaker 1: bit crazy to walk in to meet with a guy
Speaker 1: like Tim Cook, who's been in charge of a trillion
Speaker 1: dollar company, and you know, he's caring about how Auburn
Speaker 1: football is going to go, which I think just kind
Speaker 1: of speaks to the fabric with which SEC football connects,
Speaker 1: even after people may not necessarily be that connected to
Speaker 1: their alma mater anymore. Right, it really is the tie
Speaker 1: that binds forever. Yeah, it is. And and I've I've
Speaker 1: met him a number of times when I had an
Speaker 1: opportunity for one on one. I said, do you like
Speaker 1: this was in the summer. I said, do you know
Speaker 1: that you'll be able to watch Auburn football games on
Speaker 1: the phone. I was like, Oh yeah, it's like he
Speaker 1: plans around that to make ten of it. Wasn't. It's
Speaker 1: a clear passion, which is great. That's part of the
Speaker 1: It just means more attitude. We've communicated. You know, Charlie
Speaker 1: Ergan who had the dish as a Tennessee alone and uh,
Speaker 1: just fascinating to talk to. And really I've taken time
Speaker 1: to meet with as many immedia leaders as I can
Speaker 1: UM and their schedules don't work, and even whether their
Speaker 1: alums or not, I'm amazed at the number who might
Speaker 1: not be alums, wh whose children have attended one or
Speaker 1: more of our universities. UM, but they're all conversant. You
Speaker 1: can say like what are we doing right in and
Speaker 1: in the SEC network? And you know everyone talks about
Speaker 1: SEC nation on Saturday mornings. Where you've got this flavor
Speaker 1: of who we are and that's the attachment UM to
Speaker 1: the Southeastern Conference. UM. I was sharing earlier today with
Speaker 1: a friend that I'll meet senators in Congressional representatives and games.
Speaker 1: And I've literally had conversations of Hey, if you're ever
Speaker 1: in d C, I'd love to have dinner. They're saying
Speaker 1: this to me. I'm like, yeah, you know, you're busy
Speaker 1: and I don't want to impose, And I said, no, no,
Speaker 1: I would love to have dinner with you and talk
Speaker 1: about your work. Um. And I think that's maybe an
Speaker 1: illustration of it's this uh, it's this passion that it
Speaker 1: is generally a very healthy passion that provides a little
Speaker 1: bit of diversion and attachment to home, to something that
Speaker 1: that means, uh, something special from a time in their
Speaker 1: life or from someone, uh you know, a parent who
Speaker 1: may be on a lum or, or just that that
Speaker 1: was the university and its team that was kind of
Speaker 1: the city on a hill to which everybody paid attention
Speaker 1: in their youth. So there are any number of those.
Speaker 1: I'm probably ill equipped to run down the list, or
Speaker 1: somebody made me sign a confidentiality. I'm not kidding about
Speaker 1: the ladder, all right. So that is impressive in and
Speaker 1: of itself. Also stepping up from the number two to
Speaker 1: number one seat, though, will put your own life into
Speaker 1: the public eye in a way that it was never
Speaker 1: when you're number two, Right when you go up to
Speaker 1: number one, suddenly you're the guy who James Carville has
Speaker 1: taken shots at on college game day, or you're the
Speaker 1: guy who replaces Mike Slive's name in any number of
Speaker 1: message boards when people are complaining about a subtle change
Speaker 1: that they think impacts the competitive spirit of the conference
Speaker 1: or or everything else. How has that felt to you
Speaker 1: to go from I mean, I know you had a
Speaker 1: public job for people who are in the industry, but
Speaker 1: now you have a public, public job where people know
Speaker 1: you name and know what you do and holds you
Speaker 1: accountable for so many things on a day to day
Speaker 1: basis that you might have been involved in before, but
Speaker 1: you certainly weren't considered responsible for. Yeah, you know, I
Speaker 1: had a conversation with Roger Goodell where we were just
Speaker 1: talking about ficiating, and he said, you know, everybody needs
Speaker 1: somebody to blame, and unfortunately that becomes us in these roles.
Speaker 1: And you know what I found is I'm accountable not
Speaker 1: so much for what I do, but for what everybody
Speaker 1: around me does. But somebody's gonna point the finger. And
Speaker 1: you're at a leadership level where you assume responsibility, and
Speaker 1: I don't think anyone can step into it and really
Speaker 1: understand the level of attention and scrutiny. UM. And there's
Speaker 1: good and bad to that. You know, some of the
Speaker 1: things that happened in social media are kind of past
Speaker 1: disturbing um. And you know, some of the accusations just
Speaker 1: have no anchor and reality. But people want to communicate
Speaker 1: their frustrations or perceptions in the Publick Brown, I think
Speaker 1: of the interaction I have has been positive, in fact,
Speaker 1: as in our basketball tournament this year, and I had
Speaker 1: a graduate of one of our universities who grabs my
Speaker 1: arm and says I'm from and I'm like, oh no,
Speaker 1: here we go, and uh, he says, I just want
Speaker 1: you to know that there are a lot of us
Speaker 1: out here who are reasonable people and respectfully the job
Speaker 1: that's in front of you and how you how you
Speaker 1: handle And I said, you know what, you have no
Speaker 1: idea how incredibly kind that is. Because what people don't
Speaker 1: see UM in these leadership roles is that we are
Speaker 1: human beings making informed decisions. But we're all going to
Speaker 1: do the best we can. And uh, maybe we don't
Speaker 1: make the perfect decision, but it may have been the
Speaker 1: best decision given the circumstances. That then creates perceptions and
Speaker 1: everybody has emotion and feelings around it, which is great.
Speaker 1: But fundamentally we're committed to to acting with integrity and
Speaker 1: making the best informed decisions as possible. And sometimes that
Speaker 1: creates accountability. Sometimes that creates headaches and hardships, but it's
Speaker 1: done in a way that continues to advance the conference.
Speaker 1: That scrutiny should exist and will always exist, and and
Speaker 1: part of the job is to make sure you've got
Speaker 1: kind of a healthy mental outlook um from which you
Speaker 1: can can manage those pressures and whatever commentary may accompany
Speaker 1: those pressures. Do you listen to sports talker radio? Do
Speaker 1: you read ever a message board? What is your media
Speaker 1: consumption habit to kind of keep a pulse on what
Speaker 1: your fan base, meaning, you know, the larger SEC region
Speaker 1: might be thinking, not necessarily about you, but about the
Speaker 1: conference at all. How do you stay at tune? You know,
Speaker 1: they talk about how you know, when you become president,
Speaker 1: you're in the White House bubble and it's really hard
Speaker 1: to figure out what the real world is like. How
Speaker 1: do you maintain your connection to the quote unquote real
Speaker 1: world that is your constituency there. I think I've been
Speaker 1: pretty active and I'm certainly not not hiding from anyone,
Speaker 1: whether it's going to games and you're going to do
Speaker 1: that in your own bubble. But I'll walk through a
Speaker 1: crowd and say hello. So I mean that's a low
Speaker 1: level connection where you know it's one of the adjustments
Speaker 1: is to walk down a street or walk through an
Speaker 1: airport Mutch, People's heads turn as you walk past. Because
Speaker 1: I spent fifty years plus of my life where nobody
Speaker 1: knowing who I was except a friend I might see
Speaker 1: in the airport. And now I'll regularly have conversations while traveling. Um,
Speaker 1: so that's kind of a low level piece. I'm a
Speaker 1: ten of every day, so I I start pretty early,
Speaker 1: and my media consumption is from three or four different
Speaker 1: clipping services around higher education in college sports to see
Speaker 1: what's happening. I do listen to sports radio to a
Speaker 1: certain extent, depending where I'm traveling to. I'll listen uh
Speaker 1: the ESP and you radio there's a show on called
Speaker 1: out kicked the coverage um that From time to time.
Speaker 1: I'll travel too, but you're going to cover different things,
Speaker 1: so you know I'm going to consume some national stuff, um,
Speaker 1: and then you have to put that aside too. So
Speaker 1: I think there's this delicate balance between understanding what what's
Speaker 1: on people's minds and Herberman sent and our communications area
Speaker 1: and his staff will keep me informed of things. I'm
Speaker 1: the only one of the five commissioners who actually has
Speaker 1: an active Twitter account, so uh not not on game days, um,
Speaker 1: just because it's it's it's it's a strange universe. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was going to say something a little bit more pleasant,
Speaker 1: but you know, the language that the accusations just aren't
Speaker 1: anchored in reality. In fact, there was something I saw
Speaker 1: yesterday about you know, no penalty got called on this
Speaker 1: play and this is your bias, and wanted to tweet back,
Speaker 1: Actually there was a penalty hall on the plane and
Speaker 1: all the young man wasn't ejected, he was withheld from
Speaker 1: the next game. But if I enter that prey, you
Speaker 1: never get back out, and and so I'll usually just
Speaker 1: look and see what's there and then move on pretty quickly,
Speaker 1: because you know the notion that somebody with twenty six followers,
Speaker 1: who's you live it right, who's got anonymous name and
Speaker 1: is calling you gutless, her lacking courage, like I had
Speaker 1: that this spring. It was around a baseball week and
Speaker 1: I looked and it's like, you lack courage with you
Speaker 1: don't have any courage to do this for that And
Speaker 1: I'm like, wait, You've got twenty six followers and your
Speaker 1: your your Twitter handle is a bunch of vowels. So
Speaker 1: I think that's like lacking courage to accuse people publicly
Speaker 1: that way. Be sure to catch live editions about kick
Speaker 1: the Coverage with Clay Travis week days at six am
Speaker 1: Eastern three am Pacific. Last couple of questions here, and
Speaker 1: I appreciate all the time you've been listening to SEC
Speaker 1: Commissioner Greg sanky Uh this is the Winds and Lost
Speaker 1: his podcast. I'm Clay Travis. Um. You you mentioned the
Speaker 1: salaries that you made along the way, and for much
Speaker 1: of your career you're making a decent living, but it's
Speaker 1: not like you're making a living where you can really
Speaker 1: feel like, hey, I might build some wealth here. Right.
Speaker 1: That's changed for you in the last couple of years.
Speaker 1: How has that changed? And for people out there? And
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of people listening who you know,
Speaker 1: are grinding away at their job and they don't necessarily know,
Speaker 1: if there's any possibility that they're ever going to make
Speaker 1: more money. Is it better to make more money? Do
Speaker 1: you feel more comfortable now to be in a position
Speaker 1: in a chair where you're making a decent salary or
Speaker 1: and that might have been an aspiration of yours, have
Speaker 1: you found it to be overrated? I'm curious, you know,
Speaker 1: because you've been grinding away at your career for a
Speaker 1: long time, and there's a big jump between being the
Speaker 1: number two guy and being a conference commissioner. Uh that
Speaker 1: that that? Frankly, I mean it has got to be
Speaker 1: somewhat life changing. Well when I when I made a
Speaker 1: lesser salary, I didn't have to read about it in
Speaker 1: the newspapers every so often. That's just a really strange experience.
Speaker 1: Um that that Again, there's not like a master's level
Speaker 1: program that prepares you for that reality. And you know, Clay,
Speaker 1: you have to understand that as I walk through some
Speaker 1: of those job decisions, you know they were savings spent,
Speaker 1: retirement accounts that went away or debt accumulated within reason
Speaker 1: that we're part of. That was part of that. Two
Speaker 1: daughters going to college, You've got your you have a
Speaker 1: normal life, right, I mean you're never making money that's
Speaker 1: outside of the realm of normalcy. Yeah, when our oldest
Speaker 1: one to college, it wasn't like this huge college fund
Speaker 1: is part of these decisions and moves and and we're
Speaker 1: all going to make decisions, and we're again make the
Speaker 1: best decision we can bases on as much information. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you get to a point where I made a healthy
Speaker 1: living and it transitions and commissioner's role. But I will
Speaker 1: go back and say that I had but when I
Speaker 1: spent that night in the hospital and then spent three
Speaker 1: or four years trying to figure out how is it
Speaker 1: that I'm going to live? And part of that's informed
Speaker 1: by faith, but a set of principles and how I
Speaker 1: wanted to conduct myself, and part of that is living
Speaker 1: within my means um so that whether I got the
Speaker 1: job back in two thousand fifteen or didn't, I could
Speaker 1: function and I had flexibility to go take the next
Speaker 1: opportunity that would be right for me. And so you
Speaker 1: have this this financial upside that comes you realize exactly
Speaker 1: what tax rates mean they're talked about because they were
Speaker 1: pretty abstract then. And then there's another set of realities
Speaker 1: where it's not like um, there aren't pressures that come
Speaker 1: with that. I once set one of our had football
Speaker 1: coaches offices. This is ten or fifteen years ago, and
Speaker 1: I remember sitting there. I was there for an hour
Speaker 1: is really engaging meeting, But there was the biggest bottle
Speaker 1: of may loox on his desk behind him, behind his desk,
Speaker 1: and I remember thinking, I don't remember what we talked about, really,
Speaker 1: but I remember thinking, wow, he's got maylocks. I wonder
Speaker 1: what the pressures that eat at his stomach are on
Speaker 1: a day to day basis, because mine are, Hey, if
Speaker 1: I lose my job, can I pay my mortgage? I'm
Speaker 1: gonna pay for college? What about when my kids get married? Laugh?
Speaker 1: Enough in retirement. He's got none of that because of
Speaker 1: what he makes. And so there's this whole other set
Speaker 1: of pressures that that exists for that individual. Well, that's
Speaker 1: really true, you know, the the notion I kidded and
Speaker 1: said to someone the next time I asked about my salary,
Speaker 1: I say, when you look at it, like in total
Speaker 1: on an annual basis at the law, but when you
Speaker 1: consider what it is per death threat, it's not that much.
Speaker 1: And that's you give your life to this job, and
Speaker 1: that is a very different existence than what I lived
Speaker 1: for thirty years. Nothing wrong with it. I was prepared
Speaker 1: as prepared as I could be. But that move from
Speaker 1: the second chair to the lead chair of that gap
Speaker 1: is really how your life is then dictated by by
Speaker 1: the role. Last question, In fact, fact, I'll add when
Speaker 1: Mike stepped down, somebody said what are you looking forward to?
Speaker 1: And he said, not having my schedule dictated to me,
Speaker 1: not for me, but to me, And that's part of
Speaker 1: the reality that that probably informs the compensation. What do you?
Speaker 1: Last question for you? What do you do? You talked
Speaker 1: about being thirty two and having that moment where you're
Speaker 1: working all the time, caffeine four and five hours of
Speaker 1: sleep at night. What do you do now to try
Speaker 1: to get away and allow your mind to be somewhat clear?
Speaker 1: Because your decisions are a lot more consequential now than
Speaker 1: they were when you were thirty two and suddenly had
Speaker 1: that moment where you're standing at the urinal and everything
Speaker 1: comes crashing down around you. How do you manage that
Speaker 1: stress that mailocks moment as you just put it with
Speaker 1: that coach now and get away and be able to
Speaker 1: or your mind and make good decisions. That aren't just
Speaker 1: good for today or tomorrow, but we'll look good in
Speaker 1: five to ten years as the hope. Yeah. Well, the
Speaker 1: cool thing is my blood pressure, because I had to
Speaker 1: check yesterday was one over sixty eight, which I think
Speaker 1: is a pretty good accomplishment after four years and this job,
Speaker 1: and with the learning from that that experience of the
Speaker 1: night in the hospital back in was with two things.
Speaker 1: On a daily basis, I needed to have a rhythm,
Speaker 1: and this is where I'm working with. Mike'slive helped me immentally,
Speaker 1: as he was a morning person and I was not
Speaker 1: an early morning person. And the only part of my
Speaker 1: day I control is early morning. So I get up
Speaker 1: and I exercise right away, and then I have about
Speaker 1: an hour for some time for myself and I usually
Speaker 1: go to a coffee shop and I'll read, I might
Speaker 1: do some work, I might do some some reading about
Speaker 1: faith and life, uh at some time of reflection. But
Speaker 1: that's an hour of my time and that just puts
Speaker 1: me in such a healthy frame of mind, even with
Speaker 1: the pressures around me. And that's usually from six thirty
Speaker 1: to seven thirty and them and in the office, and
Speaker 1: then the day just goes um and it will be
Speaker 1: six six thirty seven o'clock before you know, I realized
Speaker 1: what day it is much what like what time it is.
Speaker 1: And so the first thing I've learned is I have
Speaker 1: to control that morning time and be pretty disciplined about
Speaker 1: it whenever I'm home and keep that routine. Um. And
Speaker 1: then I used some time uh in the you know,
Speaker 1: our kids are grown, so it's Kathy and I and
Speaker 1: you know, to talk and try to have dinner at
Speaker 1: home and have some part of regular book end. But
Speaker 1: then every couple of months, I need to step away
Speaker 1: and I need to make that time. Now it's impossible
Speaker 1: for me to do in the fall, so I've I've
Speaker 1: had to adjust. So like the week before football season
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna be away from the office. I'll be
Speaker 1: on the phone talking, but it will give me these
Speaker 1: moments to decompress and think and prepare for fourteen really
Speaker 1: intense weeks of football season. And on the back end,
Speaker 1: I do the same. I'll grab four or five days. Uh.
Speaker 1: We've we've had a rental house that we've used in
Speaker 1: upstate New York where we grew up. Um, and so
Speaker 1: we'll go up there actually for the next couple of weeks.
Speaker 1: Around July four to do a lot, and I've had
Speaker 1: to be more intentional about just blocking time. And my
Speaker 1: earlier comment about my schedule is dictated to me. Hey,
Speaker 1: there there are things where I've said, Okay, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: get away for three or four days to just think
Speaker 1: through things. Not not like vacation where I'm riding roller
Speaker 1: coasters and things, but I'm gonna go away so I
Speaker 1: can think through issues in a different setting. And then
Speaker 1: it just evaporates because something comes up and I have
Speaker 1: to be here or there. So that is part of
Speaker 1: the challenge of the role. But my earlier experience has
Speaker 1: helped me think through and try to prepare for that time,
Speaker 1: whether it's on a daily basis or on this every
Speaker 1: couple of months like where I step away for a day,
Speaker 1: try to think, get get my get my mind right
Speaker 1: with ball as they say, and get into a planning
Speaker 1: and preparation process. I know I said last question, but
Speaker 1: this one is is last question. You're from New York.
Speaker 1: Does not having an SEC degree, which Mike Slive also
Speaker 1: didn't have, is that a free requisite now to be
Speaker 1: the Commissioner of the SEC So people don't look at
Speaker 1: you and assume that you're going to be biased in
Speaker 1: one direction or another, or do you think that's just
Speaker 1: happenstance that both of you guys have kind of come
Speaker 1: from an area, in an arena where you didn't have
Speaker 1: a direct connection from birth to an SEC school. We
Speaker 1: have forty members of our staff. I think twenty of
Speaker 1: them have SEC or maybe more degrees, and so I
Speaker 1: think I have every confidence people can do jobs um
Speaker 1: in a neutral way despite their their degree. However, I'll
Speaker 1: answer it with the first time I met Steve Spurrier, Um,
Speaker 1: it's just he and I and a one on one situation.
Speaker 1: He didn't know me. He said, Hey, where do you
Speaker 1: go to college? And I said, well, I got my
Speaker 1: undergraduate degree from a state University of New York, Courtland
Speaker 1: Stay and my masters at Schyracuses of that, that's who
Speaker 1: we need is a bunch of people are on that
Speaker 1: office don't care who wins or who loses. So at
Speaker 1: least from the Steve Spurrier definition, Um, there was an
Speaker 1: asset with not having an SEC university affiliation. That's a
Speaker 1: perfect ending with a Steve Spurrier quote. And as Steve
Speaker 1: Spurri your accident, Greg Sanky, you've hung out with us
Speaker 1: here for a long time. You can find Greg Sanky
Speaker 1: on Twitter at Greg Sanky. Let him know what you
Speaker 1: think about this interview. He may or may not see it.
Speaker 1: Whatever you do, don't insult him, or if you do,
Speaker 1: claim that you're a fine bomb listener, not a Clay
Speaker 1: Travis listener. Uh and uh. I appreciate all of you
Speaker 1: for listening to Wins and Losses. Thanks again, man, this
Speaker 1: has been outstanding. I think people are really going to
Speaker 1: enjoy it. Thank you again, Greg Sanky at Greg Sanky
Speaker 1: on Twitter. This has been Wins and Losses with Clay Travis.
Speaker 1: Hope you enjoyed this one. Hope you enjoyed Jason Whitlock,
Speaker 1: and hope you enjoy Shannon Terry. We're gonna have a
Speaker 1: lot of fun conversations. Go subscribe if you haven't already.
Speaker 1: I'm Clay Travis and this has been Wins and Losses.