ESPN’s Josh Pate Talks Possible SEC NCAA Defection, Michigan & More with Rich

Greg Sankey said out loud that the SEC breaking away from the NCAA is a real conversation. Josh Pate's read on that is the part that should make everyone nervous.

"I tend to believe him," Pate told Rich.

Not entirely. Pate was careful to say it is not a zero-sum thing, and that there is probably a healthy mixture of leverage and sincerity in play. But he does not think it is a bluff, and he has receipts for why.

"I spent the entire spring going around multiple conferences, SEC included," Pate said, "and a lot of off-the-record conversations sort of sounded even more colorfully in the same vein that Greg Sankey's on-the-record comments sounded this morning."

Those conversations went all the way up to athletic directors and university presidents. The word that kept surfacing was unsustainable.

Pate's point is that unsustainable is a relative term. The current setup is going to remain perfectly sustainable for the SEC. It will remain sustainable for the Big Ten. The question those leagues keep circling is whether it is worth their time to keep carrying everyone else.

"It's them that need us, not us that need them," Pate said, describing the internal logic.

He hates all of it, and said so. As a college football-first guy, he despises that the sport is even discussing itself in these terms. Then he gave the best image of the interview.

"It's like you and I and 500 other people are on a cruise ship and we keep looking up at the captain's deck and nobody's hands are on the wheel," Pate said. Eventually the conferences look over and notice they each have a nice little lifeboat that they can control and sustain indefinitely.

What nobody knows, including the people making the threats, is where the line sits.

"What is the magic line of demarcation past which forget about it, we're going to torch the barn," Pate said. "I don't know that they know what that is. I think it's one of those we'll just know when we're there."

Rich raised the obvious complication. Any breakaway has to include the Big Ten, the conference that has produced the last three national champions.

Pate agreed, and then noted he had consulted actual legal types about whether the SEC and Big Ten going off together looks monopolistic. The answer came back as yes to certain degrees, which is why the two leagues would have to pretend not to be locked arm in arm for a while.

His warning is that we may not see it coming. Five years ago this same week, out of nowhere, Oklahoma and Texas were headed to the SEC and nobody had a whisper of it. Pate cannot shake the thought that the morsels being tossed from microphones now might be subterfuge.

"I've got to think there's some design somewhere," he said.

The bigger takeaway from Sankey's session, in Pate's view, was actually about the playoff. The SEC moved to nine conference games on the assumption that selection criteria would evolve to value strength of schedule differently. That assumption is dead. Pate quoted Sankey directly: "We had very unsatisfactory discussions with the college football playoff."

Which means wins and losses stay the ultimate metric, and Pate explained why the pro sports crowd shrugging at that is missing something. "10 and 2 Air Force and 10 and 2 Georgia sometimes are very different teams in this sport," he said.

Then came Michigan, and Rich did not pretend to be neutral about his alma mater.

The news out of Ann Arbor is that Warde Manuel will step down after this year, dropped, as Pate noted with some admiration, at the exact moment Sankey took the stage in Tampa. That is how you suck the oxygen out of a room.

It follows an investigation into the operations of the Michigan athletic department, and the resolution is partial. Bullet points get released. The full findings do not.

"I don't blame Michigan. I wouldn't either," Pate said. "You'd have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands."

His real concern is cultural. Pate credits Michigan for how fiercely it protects its tradition, and thinks that same instinct is the trap.

"When you cling to that tradition too much, you can almost close yourself off from the world," he said. "You can make your athletic department feel more like pond water than a lake that's got tributaries and streams coming into it."

The hiring question becomes the tell. Are you finding the best candidate available, or the best candidate who is already Michigan? Pate pointed out that Alabama had to go through real pain before it looked outside and found Nick Saban, and that Penn State needed the same kind of reckoning before an external hire paid off.

Rich is not hiding his frustration. He noted that Manuel was on local radio last week saying questions about his future were off-base, and is now on the way out. "That's what I'm confused about sitting here, to be very honest," he said.

Pate's answer was blunt. It has the shape of a contentious negotiated exit, and those landings are always shaky.

As for Kyle Whittingham, Pate wonders what the new coach thought when he woke up to this. He had assumed Sherrone Moore was a bridge, that Kalen DeBoer might be the permanent answer before it became Whittingham, and now Whittingham inherits an athletic department in transition before coaching a single game.

Rich made the case that Whittingham has already checked the first box by keeping the roster together, and that he will end up more tenured than whoever the next athletic director is.

Pate did not push back so much as add a warning. This is not the Big Ten of a decade ago, when Ohio State operated at an SEC level and nobody else in the league bothered. The portal, NIL, and media rights money have changed the temperature everywhere from Lincoln to East Lansing to Madison, and Indiana just won a national championship.

"The floor is a lot lower for Michigan athletics as it relates to the Big Ten hierarchy in 2026 and beyond than it would have been 2016 and beyond," Pate said.

He is joining the show weekly all season, and he sold the year ahead as well as anyone could. "It's probably going to be the most unpredictable season we've seen in a long time," Pate said, "and that's coming off Indiana winning a national title in football, so consider what's included in that statement."