While the realignment winds are howling everywhere, the SEC isn't interested in expansion for the sake of grabbing other league leftovers

MIRAMAR BEACH, Fla. — Across the country, the realignment winds are howling again. But not here on the sunny beaches of the Gulf Coast. 

While the Big 12 and Pac-12 look primed for unsettling summers, the SEC — with 16 flags now represented outside the Hilton at the 2023 Spring Meetings as Texas and Oklahoma will join the league in 2024 — is simply paying attention to what’s happening elsewhere.

The SEC won the latest round of realignment wars, and now is not the time for further raids. 

Football’s most powerful conference isn’t in a gusto to just add more teams because the rest of the sport might be crumbling around them. 

“We had opportunities presented to us. It’s really not an active thought process,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said Tuesday. 

“Period on the end of the sentence. We are, though, highly attentive to what’s happening around us. Those of you who were in Atlanta heard me say very clearly our focus is on 16 (teams).”

The ACC has seven angry members — most notably Florida State, Clemson and Miami — looking for escape hatches to get out of a bad TV deal and a grant-of-rights contract that doesn’t expire until 2036. The Pac-12 looks like a potential house of cards conference, while the Big 12 is openly courting new members hoping to become a “national league.” The Big Ten has flirted with the idea of adding additional teams like Oregon and Washington. 

The SEC? The winds are calm. The league seems quite satisfied with causing all the current instability in the first place by swiping Texas and Oklahoma two years ago, but it has no interest in further stirring the pot for immediate expansion. 

Perhaps Sankey would feel differently if there were an easier path to bringing in a Florida State or Clemson to the SEC. But there’s not, and the conference certainly isn’t going add the leftovers from a wheezing Pac-12 just to be branded as a national league, too. 

“Others have taken approaches behind microphones to say we’re pursuing members, we’re pursuing members of this region, I’ve not done that,” Sankey said. 

“Go back to those who have spoken and the tumult that causes, I think we all actually have that responsibility actually not do that.”

The tumult Sankey speaks of is happening in real-time, as Colorado is rumored to eye a jump back to the Big 12. The domino effects of that potential move would have major impacts on the other four-corner schools — Utah, Arizona and Arizona State — as well as future Power 5 hopefuls like SMU and San Diego State. 

The SEC’s cloak-and-dagger heist of Texas and Oklahoma set this latest realignment movement in motion two years ago. The two schools quietly approached the SEC about joining the league, and a deal behind the scenes was struck. In one fell swoop, the SEC added two of the biggest brands in the sport while maintaining its regional footprint. 

That move created what Sankey has previously dubbed “already a super league.” The SEC will always be proactive in conference realignment, but even attractive schools like Washington and Oregon don’t fit the league’s current approach. 

Sankey has continued to emphasize how the SEC has never “expanded outside our geographic reach.” He’s thrown shade at the Big Ten, which will soon become a coast-to-coast conference. Same for Big 12, which is eying a similar setup if it can poach the right schools.

Instead, the SEC’s footprint remains rooted in the South, and while the regional identities in Austin, Texas and Columbia, South Carolina are different — the longest road trip in the league — those two towns are still much closer aligned than two Los Angeles schools joining the Big Ten — where their shortest road trip is still longer than the SEC’s longest trip.

So for now, the SEC is satisfied. 

Schools administrators from Texas and OU are in Destin this week, listening and observing unable to vote on any proposals until they become league members on July 1, 2024. The administrators roaming the hallways wearing Longhorns and Sooners logos is a constant reminder of the evergreen presence realignment — here and elsewhere. 

But as it’s long been the case, the SEC doesn’t react to what’s happening in other leagues. It does the raiding first, and for now, the league’s pirate flags aren’t waving feverishly like they are elsewhere.