Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey said there’s no talk of a merger with the Big Ten and called the notion that the SEC wants to form a super league — the specter of which is being leveraged by lawmakers as a central threat to the future of college sports — as “not consistent with the truth.”
Sankey, in an interview Friday on “The Paul Finebaum Show,” outlined the reasons the SEC does not support a bipartisan bill introduced last week in Congress that would regulate a college sports landscape that has changed dramatically in the new era of multimillion-dollar payrolls for players.
The commissioner said there were “about one dozen big buckets” of issues the league needed to analyze in the first section of the 111-page bill. That first section does not include a proposal in a subsequent part — the rewrite of a 1961 broadcasting law that would allow conferences to pool their media rights. The SEC and Big Ten oppose that idea, which in this bill would make the pooling voluntary.