“He desires to be useful, however when you screwed up, you have been going to be accountable for that,” mentioned Greg McGarity, who was then a prime official at Florida and later spent a decade as Georgia’s athletic director. “He was not a get-out-of-jail-free-type particular person. Should you violated guidelines, particularly deliberately, he had no endurance for that.”
A Energy 5 chief and an embattled watchdog
The SEC’s leaders had set a gathering in 2015 to select Slive’s successor. And though Daniel Jones, who was then Mississippi’s chancellor, had been gravely sick for months, he resolved to be there. He needed Sankey.
“I, a dedicated anti-charismatic man, noticed a formidable, dedicated anti-charismatic man, and I assumed he’d be good,” Jones mentioned.
Different SEC chiefs have been making related calculations. David Gearhart, who was the Arkansas chancellor, mentioned Sankey was “not the flashy sort, however that’s what we favored about him.”
Their vote was unanimous.
In his second yr as commissioner, Sankey confronted the sort of scenario that, on the time, counted as a disaster. Hurricane Matthew had compelled the cancellation of Louisiana State’s sport at Florida and fueled a spat between two of the league’s powerhouses and their gamers. (An L.S.U. linebacker, for example, accused the Gators of being “scared” to play in Baton Rouge.)
Neither college was notably happy with the end result that Sankey helped devise: The colleges mixed to spend $2 million to cancel nonconference video games so they may play one another later, and coverage modifications gave the SEC extra energy for related conditions sooner or later.
“Lots of people at that time have been actually questioning if he was going to have the ability to overcome it,” mentioned Paul Finebaum, who has lined the SEC for many years, now as an ESPN host. “I assumed it was a essential second the place it might have gone two other ways. He performed it very cautiously, and he could have misplaced a headline short-term, however, in the end, he didn’t make a grievous error.”