Jun 29, 2015 01:17 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

The SEC may be more of a football conference than a basketball conference, and the league's coaches recognize their responsibility to comment on social issues unique to their part of the country.

According to ESPN, John Calipari and Frank Martin each said on the SEC coaches' conference call Monday that they support removing the Confederate flag from public places.

"Obviously, it offends a portion of our society, so people are deciding to take them down," Calipari, Kentucky's head men's basketball coach, told reporters. "That's how I feel. It may offend, so I'd say do it."

As head men's basketball coach at South Carolina, Frank Martin had already made his opinion about the Confederate Flag known. Both he, head football coach Steve Spurrier and athletic director Ray Tanner have publicly stated they support the state government's decision to remove the flag from the capitol building.

"My path through the years as a basketball coach has taken me to many African American, Hispanic and other minorities' homes," Martin said in a statement posted to Twitter. "It's been in those visits, in the eyes of parents who simply hope for a better life for their children and whose faith in God is at times their only refuge, that I am reminded how alike we all are. It is in those similarities - love for our families, respect for each other and sacrifice for our loved ones - that we must forge our future."

Spurrier even stated as early as 2007 that he wanted to see the Confederate Flag taken down, also indicating that was the general feeling among people he knew, ESPN reported.

Like Calipari, Ole Miss athletic director Ross Bjork works in SEC country, but outside South Carolina, where nine people were shot and killed at a historically black church in Charleston. The voices calling for the Confederate Flag's removal continue to echo beyond the state's boundaries.

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