DESTIN, Fla. — Aside from questions about the Southeastern Conference’s future football scheduling model, the most popular topic posed to a handful of the league’s football coaches and commissioner Greg Sankey on Tuesday centered around sports gambling.
The conference was recently impacted directly when Alabama baseball coach Brad Bohannon was at the heart of an investigation into suspicious betting activity on a game between the Crimson Tide and LSU in late April. He was fired May 4.
Sankey said Matt Holt, founder and CEO of U.S. Integrity, which provides customized sports integrity solutions, will join the spring meetings later this week to “provide us an even more in-depth presentation and help us develop our understanding” of sports gambling.
“U.S. Integrity is part of a strategy and can provide us real-time information on what’s happening, the growth of sports gambling activity [and] to a certain extent the demographics,” Sankey added.
In regards to approaching betting and gambling with athletes, Alabama football coach Nick Saban said leaders must be more diligent and clearly communicate all potential consequences to those in their programs.
“Every time these things come up, we try to make the adaptations we need to make so that we anticipate what could happen and try to avoid it,” Saban said. “One of the more difficult things is when things are legal and all of a sudden there is so much more access. People are gambling and don’t even know they’re gambling on some of these social media things [that] I don’t even know how to operate or turn on or ever been involved with.”
Georgia coach Kirby Smart said he cannot turn on a sporting event without seeing something gambling related.
Asked if he would potentially be for athletes being able to bet on sports they are not involved in such as the NBA, he added that he would hope his players would do something more productive with their money.
“The NCAA rule is pretty harsh for gambling relative to other things, and it’s pretty obvious why,” Smart said. “They don’t want that to infiltrate. There’s a lot of states, I know, including ours, that’s been a great debate on whether to allow that to come into your state. It’s more about revenue for the state. It’s more about protection for your schools. But these kids can do this regardless of what state. It’s easy access.”
Smart said his program does its best to educate players on gambling, but “sometimes it takes somebody having a pitfall to learn from their mistakes.”
“It’s literally crazy how easy it is and the access they have to it,” Smart said. “And the punishment, you have to [say to] yourself, ‘Oh my gosh, this guy could lose his entire eligibility forever for betting on a horse race in another country.’”
Flexible Razorbacks
During a Tuesday appearance on "The Paul Finebaum Show," Arkansas athletics director Hunter Yurachek and football coach Sam Pittman indicated they are OK with both football scheduling models being discussed this week.
Yurachek, seated next to Pittman on the SEC Network set, stated the eight-game conference schedule has worked in years past. Pittman echoed that sentiment.
Yurachek said what is “favorable” for Arkansas is moving from the SEC West — what many consider the toughest division in college football — to a single division. Both models will eliminate the western and eastern divisions.
“You have an opportunity to have a more balanced schedule and an opportunity for each team to come into your stadium once in a four-year period, and for you to visit each stadium,” Yurachek said. “I think a more balanced schedule is what’s best for the University of Arkansas.
“Whether it’s eight or nine games, Coach and I will figure out what it looks like after that.”
Pittman said moving to nine games would give conference teams eight more losses overall.
“It’s not broke right now,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re going to do, but we’re taking teams to the national championship. With eight, it’s not broke. But if they decide to go to nine, we’ll do that as well.”
Injury report
According to Brett McMurphy of Action Network, Missouri football coach Eliah Drinkwitz provides injury updates on his team each Thursday during the fall.
So it came as no surprise Drinkwitz, an Alma native, is in favor of uniform injury reports from SEC programs. Florida’s Billy Napier agreed.
“If it was standardized, you would see all types of strategy,” Napier said.
Georgia’s Kirby Smart said he has no issues publishing an injury report if all other schools do. Nick Saban of Alabama has not given the matter much thought.
“They do it in the NFL. I was in the NFL,” said Smart, who assisted Saban with the Miami Dolphins in 2006. “That’s not a huge deal as long as it’s a level playing field. A lot of the issues that are created in college sports today are based on an imbalance, because one state has this and another state has this. We need great leadership.
“We need somebody to come along and say, ‘This is the way it’s going to be done,’ and everybody adheres to it.”
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said a sophisticated response will be needed to manage information.
“Probably some of you just want me to tell you we’re going to send an injury report out every Wednesday,” he said. “We’re not even close to that. But we’re watching a change and we’re going to have to adapt to that change.”
Fears and anxieties
First-year Auburn football coach Hugh Freeze has attempted since his hiring late last year to be transparent about what he described as anxieties and fears he has as a head coach.
“When you wake up in the middle of the night, you’re asking yourself, ‘Does my way still work?’” Freeze said. “There’s culture and team building and, ‘Hey, let’s play a little bit better than maybe we really are.’ All of those things are going through your mind when you have a team that we just really tried to transform in a period of just a few months.”
Freeze added that it will be a challenge for himself and his staff to blend newcomers with returnees and reach the level of success expected at Auburn.
“It is new,” he said. “We’re probably not the only ones experiencing it, so I don’t want to sit up here and act like it’s just an us deal that we’re challenged with. We’ve tried to improve our roster through the new ways of the portal and high school recruiting, and it’s quite a few new faces in a short amount of time.”
Freeze said Tuesday was the Tigers’ first day of non-discretionary workouts.
“I talked to all the coaches and the strength staff this morning and kind of gave them what my thoughts were on how we needed to start this summer,” he said. “We’ll be kind of excited to see the report later today sometime.”
Happy with Hoover
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said Tuesday that he thinks the league has an “incredibly healthy” relationship with Hoover, Ala., where the SEC Baseball Tournament has been played since 1998.
The conference has one year remaining on its agreement with the city to play the tournament at Hoover Metropolitan Stadium and could potentially relocate the event after 2024.
“That [relationship has] been built over time,” Sankey said. “There’s something special there. We want to be attentive to our future. I think what we’ve done there is really the envy of a lot of people.”