THE MODERATOR: Hello, everybody and welcome to today’s press conference with SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey.
GREG SANKEY: Good afternoon or good evening, depending on your location. I hope everyone is well. We’re in the midst of day two of the SEC basketball tournament, obviously a day of celebration for the fact that we’re playing basketball. I just left the court where Missouri and Georgia are warming up for the first game this evening’s session. Amidst that celebration is a little bit of memory from what happened last year on this Thursday when we didn’t tip off. In fact, we stopped everything rapidly that day.
We have in the 12 months since walked a journey of disruption, of a lot of questions. In fact, many of you will recall around this same time last year a press conference where likely the most frequently raised – the most frequently uttered phrase by me was “I don’t know,” and that was simply an honest assessment of our situation.
The next day we stopped practice, stopped all of our on-campus activities around college athletics, and we did so never imagining we would not come back until June 8th with voluntary opportunities and then our traditional summer access well into the month of July.
Yet we sit here competing and having done so in a healthy way. I noted on an interview yesterday that in the three weeks preceding this event, our men’s basketball tournament, from the swimming and diving championships for both men and women in Columbia, Missouri, and in Athens, Georgia, our indoor track and field championships again for men and women, those being in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and in Greenville, South Carolina, with our women’s basketball championship, we’ve conducted just under 5,000 PCR-based lab-conducted third-party administered COVID tests, and from that abundance of testing had one student-athlete test positive.
That’s a tribute to the work done by our young people to remain healthy and by the leadership – evidence of leadership on our campuses. We’re here, never knowing that we might have disruption like we experienced in the regular season, yet able to still move forward.
With that, we’ll take some questions.
Q. Can you just talk about what we’ve learned in the last year and what maybe will change moving forward because of COVID?
GREG SANKEY: I could probably might go a dozen different directions. Part of my reflection is we didn’t know how to test for COVID. We didn’t know how to access supplies and manage through a process in a timely manner that would make certain we have healthy people involved in our competitions.
So you fast forward, we’ve learned how to do so. We’re not able to predict what may happen in the weeks or months ahead, so we’re fully prepared to continue forward with what we’ve learned.
I think second, we’ve learned to deal with disruption in a way that we’ve not experienced certainly in the volume we’ve seen but just the need to adapt rapidly.
Now, does that translate into a normal season, whether it’s football, soccer, basketball, whatever? I don’t know that it does, but it does demonstrate at a baseline that we can be more flexible than we have been.
I think what’s interesting is I would expect that will lead itself into conversations about the future.
I think thirdly, we’ve had to look carefully at revenue and expenses, and that’s done independently on our campuses. Everyone has adjusted. We’ve worked to be careful, working to maximize revenue distribution as we go through our fiscal year, and so that focus is something that has really always been there, but college athletics has expanded so much in the last two decades that this was an important check on how we operate.
I think fourthly, we’ve learned to continue to conduct our business, to support young people, to care for young people, to educate them. We’ve continued to meet, make decisions, have press conference and socially distance in a much more economical fashion, so that’s a learning that will continue forward.
You ask that question at a time when we have any number of issues pressing upon us other than COVID which are going to require adaptation, so I would conclude the answer with the ability to adapt through a new, unimagined dynamic circumstance is going to have to guys some of our decision making given the issues that are presenting themselves at the state and federal governmental level around college sports. We’re going to have to rely on that experience moving forward.
Q. Back in September when you guys approved the waivers for intraconference transfers, you made it pretty clear that that was because of the pandemic and not necessarily any individual waiver cases. Obviously the pandemic is still going on, so do you, A, anticipate intraconference transfers being immediately eligible this off-season? And B, do you have the sense that there’s any permanent move to alter that rule or change it in a way that hasn’t been in the past?
GREG SANKEY: An element of our decision making on the intraconference transfer waiver issue in the fall was the work happening at the national level and the expectation that in January the NCAA would change its transfer rules to essentially create commonality among sports, and obviously that impacted football and basketball in particular.
The combination of issues meant we anticipated a review of the intraconference transfer rule happening this spring. My expectation back in October – excuse me, September, October, was we’d start that activity in late January right after what is the traditional NCAA convention traditional decision-making time.
