Tennessee AD: SEC will expand past 13

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  1. truebluefan

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    Tennessee athletic director Dave Hart says the Southeastern Conference will expand again and officials at each school need to have a number of frank discussions before moving forward.

    The addition of Texas A&M as the SEC's 13th team was a good one, Hart said, but the league's leaders must take their next steps deliberately.

    "I think a lot of the conversation is just where we go from here, obviously, because at some point 13 will not be the number," Hart told The Associated Press. "There are a multitude of components to this that we have yet to really delve into. We will do that in relatively short order, but it's very complex in nature."

    The SEC announced Sunday that Texas A&M will join the conference in July after leaving the Big 12. SEC Commissioner Mike Slive said later in the week that the league's presidents and chancellors are not currently considering any other schools for admission and that he anticipates having no additional members for the 2012-13 season.

    The SEC split into divisions after adding South Carolina and Arkansas in 1992, and the addition of just Texas A&M would leave those divisions unbalanced. Possibilities of a 14th member include the Big 12's Missouri and West Virginia or Louisville of the Big East.

    Hart, who was hired by Tennessee on Sept. 5 after spending three seasons at Alabama assisting athletic director Mal Moore, declined to say who he would like the 14th school to be. He said he anticipated a number of conversations would take place in the coming weeks among the SEC's leaders on topics such as scheduling, division membership, academics and the "business aspect" of realignment. He added that those conversations will help Slive determine the future of the conference.

    "I think to say the least, this is and will be a fluid situation for weeks to come, maybe months to come," Hart said." No one can really pinpoint that at this moment, and that's just inherent to the whole conference realignment scenario. ... There are too many variables. People understand to some degree the complexity, but they really don't understand the magnitude of the complexity. It's ongoing in nature."

    Read more: http://espn.go.com/college-football...d-dave-hart-says-sec-continue-expand-13-teams
     

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