Thoughts of the Day: May 28, 2026

Calvin and Hobbes

A few thoughts to jump start your Thursday morning:  

As the Southeastern Conference spring meetings wind to a close in Destin, this quote from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes does a dandy job of defining commissioner Greg Sankey’s attempt to inject a measure of common sense and practicality into the state of college sports in these troubled times:

“That’s the problem I’m trying to fix, you moron! I can’t turn the water off because the faucet leaks! Sheesh, where were you when they were passing out brains?”

Indeed. Where are the people with brains these days? Greg Sankey is the smartest guy in any room 99 percent of the time and that includes the presidents of the 16 Southeastern Conference schools. They may have PhD after their name, but in many cases that only means they spent more years in school and then climbed the bureaucratic ladder to the top. It doesn’t mean they understand sports nor does it mean they have a keen understanding of the business that drives the sports engine.

Sankey knows, which is why he’s tapping the brakes, urging the presidents and athletic directors of the conference to take a slower, well thought out approach to matters such as expanding the College Football Playoff. This is no time for desperate measures, which is what doubling the CFP from 12 to 24 teams will prove to be. Sure, more SEC teams will get into a 24-team playoff but the overall college football product will be diluted.

Sankey favors staying at 12 teams but concedes that 16 has its merits. He’s willing to go along with adding four more teams and he has the backing of ESPN, which holds the contract for the College Football Playoff until the January 2032 championship game.

Former Florida and Ohio State coach Urban Meyer tends to agree with Sankey.

“I was OK ⁠with going to 16,” Meyer said on the Triple Option podcast. “I ⁠thought that was a good number. But 24 scares me … If we went to 16 and tried that for a few years, see how it goes, and then we can ​evaluate whether we should go to 24. And from my standpoint, I would just stay at 12 then, if we can’t get an agreement on ⁠16.”

In other words, tap the brakes. Move ahead cautiously.

A slow approach makes plenty of sense because the playoff is just one of the problems that have to be solved by the SEC and all of college sports where the combination of out of control NIL money and a transfer portal that has no guardrails have created cracks in the foundation. Tampering is rampant. Ole Miss is being investigated by the NCAA for the way it plucked linebacker Luke Ferelli away from Clemson. Everybody needs more money because the cost of doing business has risen exponentially. Kentucky has signed a basketball player who has gotten a waiver to play a seventh season. Besides the inevitable outbursts from The Mouth That Roared (Lane Kiffin), LSU has signed a soon to be 26-year-old pro from Israel to play basketball next season. The NCAA, in its infinite wisdom, is proposing 5-for-5 legislation that on the surface is a good thing, but it is written in such a way that the moment enacted will create a tsunami of legal action in courtrooms across the country.

Because the SEC is in a three-year drought without a national champ in football, there are naysayers who believe the SEC is in the Big Ten’s rearview with a gap that is only increasing. It doesn’t help matters that the Big Ten also holds the national title belts in both men’s and women’s basketball.

Sankey understands the sense of urgency when it comes to football, but he isn’t willing to concede that the SEC has hit a wall.

"I can assure you that everyone in this league is trying to figure out how to come up on the top end of that in the future," Sankey said Wednesday in Destin. "But I think from a big picture, the breadth, the depth of this league, this league stands alone. In fact, we saw metrics out of the college football playoff presentation where there's no doubt we're the strongest league. Now, there's some segments of other leagues that are towards where we are, but not nearly the entirety of a conference like the Southeastern Conference. It's a pretty special place."

The SEC is a special place, but to be truly special, the league needs to take the lead in addressing the overall mess college sports are in. All this talk of playoff expansion obscures the pressing issues that are draining all the money being generated by football. Playoff expansion should generate more money, which will help everyone balance the books, but expansion is nothing more than someone’s idea of a pill that will treat a symptom and not the cause. It might provide some immediate financial relief to schools that haven’t made wise decisions but how does playoff expansion resolve all these other issues?

Sankey is smart to dig in his heels rather than follow the pack. As Calvin once said to Hobbes, “People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don’t realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.”

ONE FINAL PITHY THOUGHT: Back in 1960, first year Florida football coach Ray Graves led the Gators to a surprising 8-2 record that included a legendary 18-17 win over Georgia Tech, led by Graves’ former boss Bobby Dodd. The reward was a trip to the Gator Bowl. Now considered an irrelevant mid-tier bowl game that is sponsored by TaxSlayer, the Gator Bowl was a very big deal back then when there were only nine bowl games in existence: Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Orange Bowl, Gator Bowl, Sun Bowl, Tangerine Bowl, Bluebonnet Bowl and Liberty Bowl.

Back in those days, bowl games were like the whipped cream and cherry on top of the ice cream sundae. They were true rewards for a season well done because bowl games didn’t factor in the voting for national champ, which took place immediately after the regular season ended. Oklahoma went unbeaten in the regular season and won the national championship but lost to Bear Bryant and Kentucky in the Sugar Bowl. In 1964, Bryant led Alabama to an unbeaten regular season and the national championship only to lose to Texas, 21-17, in the Orange Bowl, a game that ended when Joe Namath was stopped a couple inches from the goal line and the winning TD by Tommy Nobis.

It wasn’t until 1968 that the Associated Press, whose vote determined the national champion, switched until after the bowl games.

Six bowl games were added during the 1970s. When the decade of the 1980s ended there were 17. There were only 18 bowl games when Steve Spurrier and the Gators won their first national championship in 1996. Fewer bowl games meant quality games that made New Year’s Day special.

Fast forward 30 years later and we not only have a 12-team playoff that threatens to expand to either 16 or 24 teams, but we have more than 40 bowl games. The product has been diluted. A 6-6 team in the regular season gets to go bowling and is rewarded for mediocrity. ESPN doesn’t care because it has holes in its December scheduling that require filling and what better way to do it than a bowl game even if it means subjecting two teams to a week in Shreveport. School presidents and athletic directors can use bowl games as an excuse to avoid the unpleasant task of firing a coach. There was once this unwritten rule that getting to a bowl game was a coach’s lifeline. It is far less a factor now, but still figures prominently in many decisions that involve a coach getting another year.

So, let’s not be fooled by all this talk about expanding the College Football Playoff. Coaches want it because the plethora of bowl games has knocked holes in the barrier that once protected them from firing. Doubling the number of playoff berths puts a new obstacle in the path of administrations hell bent on firing a coach.

School presidents and athletic directors see dollar signs. Less chance of having to fire a coach and pay buyout money. Commissioners like Phillips and Yormark, whose per team payouts pale in comparison to the SEC and Big Ten, see more money generated by additional teams in the playoff. The Big 12 (Texas Tech) and ACC (Miami) had only one team each in last season’s playoff while the SEC had five and the Big Ten three. These guys are no dummies. They are well aware that there are only a handful of teams capable of winning a national championship every year. More teams in the playoff won’t increase the odds of someone from their team winning it all but will bring in more money.

Unfortunately, these days it’s all about the money and not about the quality of the game.