Greg Sankey not happy with ESPN broadcasters criticizing SEC officiating: ‘That is unacceptable to me’

The Missouri Tigers saw their College Football Playoff hopes all but disappear with Saturday’s loss to the Texas Longhorns.

The back-and-forth affair, which was broadcast on ESPN, saw the Tigers end up on the wrong side of video reviews time and time again, with analyst Jesse Palmer saying in the third quarter that Tigers fans had a right to be “livid” over what felt like lopsided officiating.

SEC Network’s broadcast team of Aaron Murray and Matt Schumacker also questioned the officiating in Missouri’s loss while calling Saturday night’s contest between the Florida Gators and Oklahoma Sooners.

Rightsholders like the SEC generally don’t love it when analysts bash their referees, and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey publicly addressed it on Monday.

“I am highly disappointed in announcers and their criticism, and they’re wrong,” Sankey said during an appearance on The Paul Finebaum Show. “Some of the worst officials in America are those in the announce 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,” Sankey continued. “We’ve made announcements where 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, 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.”

“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

Sankey also touched on the logistical difficulties involved with providing live audio access during replay reviews, which the ACC and Big 12 have embraced.

“There’s a debate now about why aren’t we allowing access to audio in our replay room. We have never said no,” he asserted. “We have just said you have to make sure you do it right. You know, Paul, we don’t have the luxury of a Thursday night or a Friday night game where you can do like one game at a time and Everybody’s eyes and voices and minds are on that one monitor. We play on Saturdays with, at times this year, seven games happening at once.

“So you have to figure out how to manage that process so you continue to have the right outcomes. Second is, you and I were talking pretty casually, and then the lights come on, the cameras come on, the microphone’s hot, and we change.”

The commissioner also pointed toward the NFL’s lack of audio access for its replay reviews.

“The NFL doesn’t provide this audio access at this point. So, it’s not just us that’s kind of an outlier. And I think when any of us do it, we want to get it right.”

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