For years the SEC was known across the sports landscape for one thing, and that was college football.
That’s not to say there weren’t dominant SEC teams in other sports — because there absolutely were — but as the saying goes, “it just means more” when it comes to SEC football.
In the south, SEC is more religion than sport, and many dominant football teams have come out of the conference.
Still, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the league is starting to become “the” dominant league across college sports as a whole. Just look at the upcoming men’s NCAA basketball tournament, which features 14 SEC teams.
This dominance is the goal, according to commissioner Greg Sankey, and he doesn’t sound satisfied just yet.
“We want to be an everything league,” Sankey said on The Pat McAfee Show on Monday (h/t On3). “I think we’ve got one, two and three in gymnastics nationally right now. Baseball, one in softball. You know, I haven’t checked the golf and tennis rankings, but we got to be close. There was a point a couple weeks ago where we had 14 teams, or 14 sports in competition, and we had the number one ranked team in 12 of those sports. That’s what we want to be. We go through this change, we talk a lot about opportunities across the board, we want to be great in everything, and I think we can do that.”
This is an important statement in the context of the NIL, transfer portal and conference expansion era, because if you think that the SEC is going to sit around all fat and lazy and be happy with what it has, you’ve got another thing coming.
