MORGANTOWN — If you’ve paid attention at all to college athletics over the last 10 years, chances are you have symptoms of the ailment known as Southeastern Conference overload.
Whether it’s college football, basketball or certainly baseball, most by now are under the impression that Greg Sankey is not the commissioner of the SEC, but rather he’s the man behind the big red curtain swimming in cash and pulling the strings of ESPN and the entire sports world as we know it.
WVU baseball coach Steve Sabins — whether he realizes it or not — can play a minor role in relieving the rest of the sports world of its inferiority complex with the SEC when the 24th-ranked Mountaineers play Kentucky in the opening round of the NCAA tournament on Friday.
More on that in a moment, but first we have to give some context on how we got here.
That 12-team College Football Playoff that was unveiled last season, much of the creation of that expanded tournament fell on Sankey’s shoulders.
When it expands even further — possibly as early as 2026 — to 16 teams, it will be Sankey spearheading that movement, too.
But it will come at a price that, under Sankey’s proposition, would guarantee four spots in that playoff to schools from the SEC.
It would also guarantee four sports for Big Ten teams and just two for the Big 12 and two for the ACC.
There would also be one guaranteed spot for the top Group of Six school, as well as three at-large bids, which if you were to get Sankey’s truest sentiment, it should be a law that two of those at-large bids should go to SEC schools, too.
I don’t have to tell you that money drives all of this, meaning the more teams you have from your conference, the more money that conference earns to spread out to its schools.
In last season’s…
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Publish date : 2025-05-28 02:34:00
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