By GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor
The way USA Today senior college football writer/columnist Matt Hayes sees it, the Southeastern Conference and commissioner Greg Sankey are the 300 Spartans and the Ancient Greek King of Sparta Leonidas, respectively.
And the Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, Notre Dame, the American Football Coaches Association and many others are the Persians in the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC.
What they were fighting about in that famous battle of the Greco-Persian War is too complicated to get into.
What Sankey and the SEC are fighting for is keeping the College Football Playoff at 12 teams or expanding to 16, while the Big Ten, Big 12, ACC, AFCA, Notre Dame and many others want to go to 24.
A critical battle – though likely not to go down in history quite how the fighting at the historic mountain pass of Thermopylae in central Greece did – is possibly set for the SEC Against The World on Tuesday through Friday AD at the SEC Spring Meetings in Destin, Florida. There are some beach passes there and maybe a dune, but no mountains.
The presidents, athletic directors and football coaches from all 16 SEC schools along with other coaches and personnel and league officials will be meeting throughout the week on the state of college football, which tends to be run by the SEC. Although, the Big Ten’s role is getting bigger lately as their football teams are better now and have taken the last three national championships.
“It’s going to be as big as they’ve ever been, I think,” Hayes said of the 2026 SEC Spring Meetings on Tiger Rag Radio last week.
Listen to Tiger Rag’s entire interview with Hayes by clicking the link immediately below.
“I think you could make the argument that these are going to be the biggest meetings they’ve ever had here in Destin,” Hayes said.
And the SEC has had its sandy spring meetings just off the Gulf of Mexico in Destin since the 1980s with some biggies.
This is where then-SEC commissioner Roy Kramer casually announced in 1990 the bombshell that the SEC would be adding two teams and starting an SEC Championship Game in the 1992 season. And college football has never been the same, as that SEC title game led the way to the actual college football playoffs with the Bowl Championship Series in 1998 and onward as other conferences soon copied the SEC playoff. And the playoffs grew and grew to the current 12 teams.
The ball began rolling directly toward an historic nine-game SEC football schedule that starts this year at the meetings last year before final approval last August.
“There’s a lot going on,” Hayes said. “The 16 presidents and chancellors from the SEC have the ability to either take a stand or not on the playoffs.”
Sankey does not like the idea of 24 teams in the College Football Playoff.
Neither does Hayes. Partly because he says most of the early games will be terrible, which is often already the case in the 12 team-playoff.
“It’s like the SEC is saying, ‘We are the 300, and you are the Persian Empire coming at us. And we’re not moving. No, we’re not going to 24. We’re staying at 12 or we’re going to 16. That’s it. End of story,'” Hayes mused. “A lot of possibilities are on the table. The overarching question is, ‘Do they (the SEC) dig in and say, ‘No, it’s not happening.’ Because if they do, the other conferences will back down. I really believe that.”
As far as the Battle of Thermopylae, Sankey should know that Commissioner Leonidas died in it, and the Persians won and went on to burn Athens – not the one in Georgia, but close enough. Sankey should feel relieved that in the end, the Greeks – in this case the SEC – because of the previous efforts of those 300 Spartans and Commissioner Leonidas – eventually won the war. And Thermopylae went down in history as a symbol of courage and defiance against overwhelming odds, which the Big Ten seems to have now over the SEC.
We shall see.
There will be other topics of great discussion in Destin this week, too, and they are likely to exclude the Greco-Persian War, unless Hayes himself takes the podium. And there have been many speakers not nearly as good.
“There’s a lot going on, man,” Hayes said. “How are they going to enforce the NCAA rules? What rules are they going to have? Will the CSC (College Sports Commission formed in 2025 that is supposed to govern Name, Image & Likeness deals and revenue sharing) have any kind of factor at all in private NIL deals? They’re now running the sport, which we all knew would happen.”
Stay tuned on the SEC Network.
Or perhaps The History Channel.
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