SEC's Sankey: Idea of super league 'not consistent with the truth' - ESPN

Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey said there's no talk of a merger with the Big Ten and called the notion that the SEC wants to form a super league — the specter of which is being leveraged by lawmakers as a central threat to the future of college sports — as «not consistent with the truth.»

Sankey, in an interview Friday on ESPN's «The Paul Finebaum Show,» outlined the reasons the SEC does not support a bipartisan bill introduced last week in Congress that would regulate a college sports landscape that has changed dramatically in the new era of multimillion-dollar payrolls for players.

Sankey said there were «about one dozen big buckets» of issues the league needed to analyze in the first section of the 111-page bill. That first section does not include a proposal in a subsequent part — the rewrite of a 1961 broadcasting law that would allow conferences to pool their media rights. The SEC and Big Ten oppose that idea, which in this bill would make the pooling voluntary.

«But I really need to see that it's voluntary to understand some components of how that would be treated under different scenarios,» Sankey said. «I think the notion that we would simply rush to say we support is not the appropriate position. I do think it's appropriate to try to work through these issues.»

One of the bill's sponsors, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has said the bill would prevent the two biggest conferences from forming a super league, a notion that Sankey knocked down in the interview with Finebaum and that Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti told Yahoo Sports is a «fabrication.»

In testimony this week at a Senate hearing about the bill, Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua, a former NBC executive, was asked about the super