ATLANTA (AP) - Greg Sankey is limping around on a knee that is feeling the effects of 41 marathons, most of which he has run during the last 12 years when he has been working as the Southeastern Conference commissioner's right-hand man.
A few years back Sankey decided to run a marathon a month for a year. He ended up doing it for 15 straight months, and one month he ran two.
The 50-year-old upstate New Yorker-turned-honorary-Southerner has never shied away from taking on challenges. And he may have a big one coming up next year.
As the SEC's executive associate commissioner and chief operating officer since March 2012, he's been handling day-to-day operations while Commissioner Mike Slive worked on major projects such as the SEC Network and the College Football Playoff.
The 74-year-old Slive announced Tuesday he will retire in July 2015. Sankey could very well be his replacement.
"Bottom line, I think he has the potential to be one of the truly great leaders in intercollegiate athletics," Conference USA Commissioner Britton Banowsky said.
The foundation of college sports is being threatened in the courts, and their structure is being revamped. Sankey embraces the task of plotting a course for their future.
"Part of my effort to educate myself is trying to learn history. Where we've been and why," he said in a lengthy interview with the AP at the start of the football season. "One of the things you learn is it has always been a bit of a struggle, the tension between the existence of college athletics on campus.
"From a core standpoint it exists on our campuses because it's centered on education. Sometimes there's stress in there. There are problematic stories. There are volumes of great stories."
Sankey grew up in Auburn, New York, and went to college to be an engineer. That lasted about two years. He said he still remembers the spot in the garage of his childhood home where he told his father, a pipefitter, that he wanted to teach and coach basketball.
"So I became a phys. ed. major," he said. "It's like the most extreme transition you can make educationally."
Intellectual curiosity and willingness to make do have guided Sankey's career. His first leap of faith was moving to Natchitoches, Louisiana, almost three decades ago, so he could take a job as an intern in the athletic department at Northwestern State, making "$500 dollars a month, stuffing envelopes."
He eventually moved to the league office at the Southland Conference, working in compliance. At 31, he became commissioner.
"My Dad, I took him to the Final Four when I was Southland commissioner. He said, "I think you made the right decision,'" Sankey said.
When Slive became SEC commissioner in 2002, he walked into a conference that was an NCAA compliance wreck. Nine of the 12 programs were either under investigation or on probation. Soon after he started, a 10th was being investigated.
Fixing the problem was Slive's top priority, and he hired Sankey to help him.
"We both saw and understood the issues and what it would take to make the cultural change that we have been successful making," Slive said.
The SEC currently has three programs on NCAA probation, but Sankey proudly notes the problems have been more isolated incidents and that schools are better equipped to root out problems.
"We have 12 compliance staff on some of our campuses now versus one or two paying attention. Our coaches know these are not just compliance issues," he said. "These are matters that relate to institutional integrity from the public."