Mike Slive in no rush to get 14th SEC team

Now that the SEC has its 13th member in Texas A&M, it’s time to search for the 14th team.

Or is it?

The SEC announced Sunday that Texas A&M will officially begin athletic competition in the 2012-13 season. That means the Aggies will be coming to an SEC city near you very soon.

But 13 is an odd number. Worse, it’s a prime number. So SEC commissioner Mike Slive must be reaching out to a handful of schools, gauging their obvious interest in such a successful conference, right?

Well, as of Monday that wasn’t necessarily the case. During Texas A&M’s official introduction into the conference in College Station, Texas, Slive said that he is in no hurry to add a 14th member to the conference and has a plan in place to play the 2012 football season with just 13 teams.

“We anticipate being a 13-team league,” Slive said Monday.

While it might seem odd (and prime) Slive said he’s fine with an unlucky number of SEC teams.

“We have not been necessarily looking to expand,” Slive said. “At some point in time that may come to pass. But this isn’t something that we feel we have to do right away. Clearly, scheduling with 13 is not easy, and we’ll work through that. But we will remain very thoughtful and very strategic about what we do in terms of further expansion.”

As for future schedules, Slive said the SEC has put together a transition team to begin working on them. Sixteen members of his staff went to College Station to begin scheduling conversations.

“The goal will be for the transition team to develop a series of options, and when these options are developed, we will take the options to our athletic directors for their consideration,” Slive said. “Once we have schedules worked out, we’ll be in a position to announce them.”

The SEC also isn’t worried about financial security with the addition of a new team. Slive said in the TV contracts with the SEC, there are agreements in place that deal with the conference’s makeup, in case the league adds or loses a school. There are also negations in place dealing with “look ins.” Look ins are used in order to help the conference adapt during its 15-year agreements when things change, like the landscape of the league and college football.

Basically, the conference is going to see to it that schools aren’t getting shorted revenue because of a new mouth to feed.

“So with the provision for a look in, we will sit down and make sure that at the end of the day, given the composition of our league, that we have exactly what we bargained for when we started.”

Source: http://espn.go.com/blog/ncfnation/post/_/id/48160/mike-slive-in-no-rush-to-get-14th-sec-team

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