'Given no other choice': Oklahoma AD Roger Denny criticizes SEC's scheduling move for Ole Miss game

Why was Oklahoma-Ole Miss the only NCAA game that had to be played on Sunday?

Oklahoma had offered to play Saturday anyway, even at night. The league said no.

Denny's line near the end of the statement is the one that will follow Sankey around: "Put simply, this decision isn't fair to our athletes, our institution, or to Sooner Nation. But we've been given no other choice. We are obligated to play the game when directed, but we remain steadfast in our belief that the wrong outcome was reached this evening."

He's right. Nobody is saying Ole Miss should have bussed through the night. However, there's a difference between a league making a hard call and a league telling a member school to take it or forfeit ... and Sankey, by Denny's account, did both in the same conversation.

The detail that sticks is that other teams got out. Fellow SEC schools Texas and Tennessee both flew Friday night after the stoppage lifted. Alabama bussed to Nashville for its Saturday game against Vanderbilt. However, Ole Miss, flying out of Tupelo, about 50 miles from Oxford, couldn't get its charter company to turn a plane around.

Denny conceded the Rebels "explored every avenue" but noted no other traveling team failed to find a solution ... and it still doesn't change the outcome. The team that couldn't solve its travel problem got the schedule bent around it. The team sitting at home got told to rearrange its weekend or else.

The fans is the issue Denny kept coming back to in his statement, and for good reason. Thousands bought tickets and booked hotels for a Saturday afternoon kickoff. Now it's noon on Sunday, making it OU's first regular-season Sunday game since Sept. 1, 2019.

The fans lose the Saturday they paid for, and the school absorbing all of it did nothing wrong.

None of this makes the SEC's decision indefensible. Once Ole Miss couldn't land until Saturday afternoon, the options were Sunday or nothing. Sankey made the only call that gets the game played ... but the only call and a fair call aren't the same thing.

That's why Denny posted at midnight instead of sleeping on it. A forfeit threat turns a logistics decision into a power decision. Once a commissioner plays that card, the school on the other end has every right to say so in public.

The game will be played Sunday at noon, and it could well be a good one. After all, Ole Miss is 6-3 and chasing the playoff, Oklahoma is 5-4 and playing for pride and the opportunity for a better bowl berth.

But whatever happens on the field, the story of this game was already written before kickoff, in a statement posted at 12:12 on a Saturday morning.