SEC commissioner Greg Sankey casts doubt Ohio State playing in SEC if Big Ten cancels season

While appearing on the Dan Patrick show on Tuesday morning, SEC commissioner cast serious doubts on Ohio State joining the SEC for a year.

The Big Ten football season has been shelved for the fall of 2020, and that brings up all kinds of questions.

You may have heard the speculation about teams in other conferences taking an opportunity to cross into another conference if their league shuts down college football this fall. Most notably, social media was abuzz about the prospects of Ohio State joining the SEC for the fall if it still wants to provide its student-athletes the opportunity to compete this fall.

It sounds great at first glance, but why not ask the commissioner of one of those conferences that might still play on the prospects of that occurring? That’s exactly what Dan Patrick did on his show Tuesday morning. He spoke with SEC commissioner Greg Sankey in an interview touching on several subject, including the notion of welcoming in a team for one season into the SEC.

And when it came to asking if a team like Ohio State would be welcomed to the SEC for a year, Sankey pointed to all kinds of contractual and legal concerns that would likely hinder and even keep that from happening.

“There probably any number of legal, contractual, media — I could just go down the list of reasons why that’s not quite practical.”

Now, that’s not saying these sorts of hurdles couldn’t be cleared, but the chances of Ohio State — or any other team for that matter — stepping outside of a conference if the Big Ten shelves the 2020 football season is not as easy as calling up the SEC commissioner and making it happen.

You can listen to the rest of Swankey’s interview with Dan Patrick via the YouTube link below. His appearance occurs at roughly 25 minutes in.

As the college football world turns, so do the days of my sportswriting life.

 

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