Greg Sankey is the weird playoff brake
Context
The show's posture is reluctant and comparative: after years of SEC fatigue, anti-24-team listeners may find themselves preferring Sankey's 16-team position because it is less destructive than the Big Ten's 24-or-12 framing. The point is not that the SEC is altruistic. It is that, in this specific negotiation, the SEC's self-interest overlaps with preserving more scarcity.
That makes the expansion politics strange. Fans who do not want the playoff to go completely off the rails may end up hoping the SEC does not concede too much to the Big Ten/Fox inventory push.