Nothing touches the NFL for popularity across the country. That cannot be argued, but Steak Shapiro knows that in the South, college football still reigns supreme.
The 92.9 The Game midday host interviewed SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey on Thursday’s edition of The Steakhouse. Co-host Drew Butler mentioned that he enjoyed the schedule release show the conference put together on the SEC Network to show how 2024 will look when Oklahoma and Texas join the league and the division format ends.
“That’s kind of taking a page from NFL Network and others, right?” Shapiro said. “The SEC is a 365-day-a-year news machine.”
While the NFL has done a good job of creating a calendar to keep fans talking about the league during its long offseason, the SEC has largely relied on fan passion. Sankey admitted that he realized that may no longer be good enough.
“We left Destin and we announced eight games and there was kind of this ‘Aww, eight games,’” he said of fan reaction to the lack of big news coming out of the conference’s spring meetings. “And then we knew the work we had to do.”
The result was the schedule release show and a social media presence similar to what NFL teams do on that league’s schedule release day. The games the SEC announced are still over a year away and the conference and SEC Network were still able to make must-see television out of it for college football fans.
“It’s one of those things where I ask myself, why don’t we do it that way before?” The Commissioner said.
Plenty of headlines this week are being generated at SEC Media Days in Nashville. Vanderbilt officially kicks off the conference’s football season on August 26 when the Commodore host Hawaii.
