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Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey was asked Thursday at the SEC Media Days about John Calipari’s move from Kentucky to Arkansas and the overall status of basketball in the conference.
Enjoy his rather long answer:
“The transfer portal is there for coaches, too, right? We’ve had that in different sports. I said yesterday it’s good to have John in the league. It’s great to get to know Mark (Pope) and come to know him. I saw Eric Musselman back in Vegas around the LSU-USC game. I enjoyed working with Eric and the energy he brought.
“From an evaluation of health, if you go back to 2004 and look back a little bit, we had remarkably competitive basketball at the highest level broadly in this league. When I took over in 2015, really in preparation for the interviews, but then as you’re trying to make decisions, looked at what happened in that 2014, ’15, ’16 window. A lot of change. A lot of lack of continuity, if you will. We had a cycle of coaches changes.
“If you go back, Billy Donovan and Kevin Stallings at that time, in 2014, were the longest tenured coaches and had been at that level of sustained success. John came in, won a national championship. We had a lot of churn.
“We also had the Academic Progress Rate and the Academic Performance Program, where I think we hadn’t adjusted quickly to meeting the expectations in those programs. Programs adapted. Our APR scores improved I think even over time in men’s basketball, our graduation rates improved. There’s a lot there.
“I think is been really healthy before, really competitive. Arkansas joined, won the national championship. Kentucky in ’96 and ’98. But others were close. The depth right now is not something we’ve seen in a long time. I’m not sure even when we had those high, high-level teams you saw the depth.
“Now we’ve grown to 16. We have nine of the top 25 on the men’s basketball side and seven of the top 25 in the AP poll on the women’s basketball side from one conference. And everybody wants to grab that mountaintop. I do think it’s an enormously positive story about the health of our basketball, both on the men’s and women’s side. I think it’s an indication of meeting our own expectations, which when our men’s performance lagged, I spoke about in rooms.
“I hope we can exceed our expectations, not just attain the national championship opportunities we’ve seen on the women’s side, but multiple teams playing for those championships.”
