MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — In reaction to the controversial comments made recently by his head coach, Lane Kiffin, first-year LSU athletic director Verge Ausberry told ESPN on Thursday that he has spoken with his coaches about the importance of unity within the SEC.
Ausberry, who was promoted this past November after working at the university for more than 30 years, said his message has been “worry about LSU. Everything’s about LSU.”
“It’s not about the other place you were at before, the other schools in this conference,” he said. “In the SEC we have to be one. Every other organization from NASCAR, to the NFL, NBA, they’re one. We fight each other on the fields: Saturday nights, basketball games, baseball weekends, track and field, that’s when we compete. After that, this is one. When you start breaking up and doing our own things, that hurts our conference.”
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, speaking to reporters for the fourth straight day at the conclusion of the league’s spring meetings, declined to say if any fines or sanctions are coming to Kiffin or Texas coach Steve Sarkisian. Sarkisian told USA Today earlier this month that “all you have to do is take basket weaving, and you can get an Ole Miss degree.” He conceded this week that was a “poor choice of words.”
In the four-hour interview with Vanity Fair, Kiffin, who was the head coach at Ole Miss before taking the same job at LSU, said some top recruits would tell him they weren’t interested in coming to Oxford, Mississippi.
“[They would say], ‘Hey, Coach, we really like you, but my grandparents aren’t letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi,'” Kiffin told the magazine. “That doesn’t come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Parents were sitting here this weekend saying the campus’s diversity feels so great: ‘It feels like there’s no segregation. And we want that for our kid because that’s the real world.'”
Sankey said he doesn’t announce public reprimands at podiums.
“I’ve addressed those issues directly in each meeting this week,” Sankey said.
The league’s annual meetings included football coaches, men’s and women’s basketball coaches, athletic directors, and university presidents and chancellors. In spite of some of the spitballs that were flying this spring, Sankey said there was a “strong consensus” about the need to work together to find solutions to the period of historic changes impacting college athletics.
“I thought the last couple days with the leadership of our presidents and chancellors was very open, very honest, very much focused on how we collaborate together with the right kind of right frame of mind, right attitude, very positive, knowing there’s a lot of challenges ahead,” he said.
In what was the SEC’s only official vote here, the presidents and chancellors issued a joint statement in opposition to pooled media rights, an option in the latest Cruz/Cantwell bill should 75% of schools favor it. (If every school outside of the Big Ten and SEC voted in favor, that would be 75% by exactly one vote.)
The statement read: “The Southeastern Conference recognizes and appreciates the many ongoing discussions regarding potential system-wide improvements to ensure the future success of college athletics. The SEC has been intentional, through years of thoughtful planning and decision making, in strategically positioning itself for future media negotiations. The Conference must retain the ability to act in the best interests of its membership. As such, the SEC does not support assigning its media rights to a third party and remains firmly committed to independently conducting its media negotiations.”
Sankey told ESPN’s David Hale that there’s “no data that support the opinions that somehow these predicted uplifts are there” from pooled media rights.
“You’re in a universe where there’s a pretty defined pool of media rights, and those are driven by eyeballs, leadership and consumption,” he said. “We do that very well and want to continue. We also want the flexibility to decide when our games are played and who decides that.”
As expected, Sankey said no votes or decisions were made on the future of the College Football Playoff format.
“I want to be clear,” he said, “we’ve never stated opposition to 24. We’ve stated support for 16, and if we’re going to make a decision, that’s where we’ve been, but … we’ll keep an open mind, and we’ll continue grinding through our own research on ideas.”
