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