FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — SEC commissioner Greg Sankey is, first, a politician.

He obviously learned a lot from politicians on both sides of the aisle in taking a difficult question, ignoring it and delivering his balanced message.

Then sitting back and taking the credit.

Which is probably a good thing because he basically repeatedly pounded a message that the federal government is going to have to get involved in college athletics.

That’s the bottom line message after he’s met with all of his committees of athletic directors, coaches and player representatives.

The result of all that is nobody has a clue what to do in the college athletic world of chaos these days, so they want Congress to do their job for them and tell them what to do.

“Each group recognizes that it’s never going to be the way that it was, but it doesn’t have to be the way that it is,” Sankey said a couple of times to open SEC Media Days 2022 in Atlanta this morning.

In politics, that’s called straddling the fence.

“In college athletics, we’re here because we’ve either pushed aside some of those conversations and decisions or we’ve dealt with the easy solutions rather than the complexities that account for the full breadth of outcomes and consequences,” Sankey said.

Now that final comment was actually about as close to the unvarnished truth as it gets. Answering like a politician creates some rather long and complex sentences that would be impossible to diagram.

What he was saying with all that is if it’s too complicated we put a band-aid on it and hope nobody notices.

That actually seems to work most of the time in today’s world.