SEC Commissioner calls announcers worst referees in America

SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey defended the conference’s referees during an appearance on “The Paul Finebaum Show” on Monday.

Sankey said he feels college football announcers are the worst referees in the country.

“I am highly disappointed in announcers and their criticism, and they’re wrong,” Sankey said. “Some of the worst officials in America are those in the announcer’s booth. We have officiating experts who I turned on a game on Saturday who was just flat wrong. And what that creates is this narrative that we’ve done something wrong, and that is unacceptable to me. And we have to address that. We’re going to be wrong. We’ve made announcements and we own it. We’re going to have debates about judgment calls. But somebody on a Saturday night who’s announcing a game between Oklahoma and Florida, going back to something that happened at noon that he’s never called and asked a question about, and being critical is unacceptable in my mind. So we’ll take the responsibility, we’ll take the heat, we’ll work to continually improve, and we’ll work on how do we provide more transparency and access to our replay system. We’ll do that collectively so that we have the best-in-class model.”

Sankey went on to explain that the SEC is exploring avenues to be more transparent in the future.

“Some of the worst ‘officials’ in America are those in the announce booth.”

“I am highly disappointed in the announcers.”

Greg Sankey vehemently defends the SEC’s officiating and details planned improvements: https://t.co/eFCIQgWKzp

— Paul Finebaum (@finebaum) November 9, 2026