CHARLOTTE — A man often dubbed the most powerful person in college sports — Southeastern Conference Commissioner Greg Sankey — calls Birmingham, Alabama, home, but shared some thoughts on Thursday about his conference’s Queen City connections.
Sankey, who became SEC commissioner in 2015, spoke to the Charlotte Sports+Business networking group at the NASCAR Hall of Fame. The SEC and Big Ten have become the most lucrative and influential college conferences over the past decade, widening the gap over rival leagues, in large part, because of dominant football teams and accompanying multibillion-dollar media rights contracts.
Charlotte, of course, welcomed the Atlantic Coast Conference in August 2023, when the conference relocated its headquarters to uptown after 70 years in Greensboro. The area has long boasted deep ACC roots, with 100,000 alums calling the region home.
Sankey shared some of the SEC’s connections to the region, including its nearest member school, South Carolina, whose campus is 90 miles away in Columbia. The SEC’s law firm, Robinson Bradshaw, is based here, as is SEC Network, the conference cable network started in 2014 and owned by ESPN. SEC Network occupies studios at ESPN’s offices in Ballantyne.
“We have a large group of alums here,” Sankey told CBJ afterwards. “Obviously, the University of South Carolina is nearby but a lot of our eastern schools have strong alumni bases (in the area).”
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