NASHVILLE, Tenn. — SEC commissioner Greg Sankey does not view himself as commander of the Death Star with his finger on the big red button, ready to annihilate the NCAA Tournament as we know it. Despite recent comments by Sankey to ESPN that sounded some alarms around college basketball, he does not envision a future in which the national championship tournament includes only teams from power conferences.
“No, I don’t. No, no. That’s an overread of the comment,” Sankey told The Athletic on Saturday during his league’s semifinals. The comment in question, to ESPN’s Pete Thamel, came after Sankey pointed out that UCLA made a run from the First Four to the Final Four in 2021 and Syracuse went from the play-in game in Dayton to the Sweet 16 in 2018, demonstrating the potential of power-conference teams on the NCAA Tournament bubble.
“That just tells you that the bandwidth inside the top 50 is highly competitive,” Sankey told Thamel. “We are giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers (from smaller leagues), and I think that pressure is going to rise as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top end because of (conference) expansion.”
Next year, the SEC and Big 12 will both be 16-team leagues. The Big Ten and ACC will have…
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