Steve Spurrier was coming back to college football as South Carolina's new coach when he met Greg Sankey for the first time.
Where, Spurrier demanded of Sankey in 2004, did you go to college? Sankey, then a Southeastern Conference associate commissioner, assured Spurrier that his degrees were from Cortland State and Syracuse, leaving him free of the partisanship that defines Southern college football.
Sankey recalled that Spurrier, irrepressible as ever, replied: “That’s what we need: a bunch of people in that conference office who don’t care who wins or who loses.”
But Sankey cared very much about winning in other ways.