DESTIN, Fla. — The meeting rooms are a bit more crowded this year. The SEC has pulled up more chairs to the tables.
Missouri and Texas A&M, which officially join the SEC on June 30 and begin league play in the fall, are full participants in the conference’s annual spring meetings here this week.
“We’re the new guys,” Texas A&M football coach Kevin Sumlin said. “I don’t think we’re in any position to pound the table about anything right now.”
Their presence, though, speaks volumes about a whirlwind year for the SEC, which insisted it was content to stay at 12 teams when it met here a year ago. Within four months of the 2011 spring meetings, the SEC had agreed to add its 13th and 14th members.
Now Texas A&M and Missouri are represented at the Hilton Sandestin Beach resort, the SEC’s first newcomers in 20 years.
Display boards outside the meeting rooms provide introductory information on the educational and athletic histories of the two schools.
The new guys are getting a lot of attention here this week. While Georgia football coach Mark Richt met with about a dozen media members in one room, three times as many gathered around Missouri coach Gary Pinkel down the hall — even though Pinkel had gone to the wrong room.
“When you go into a new league, it’s like Day 1,” Pinkel said. “... I’m coaching in the Big 12, and all of a sudden I’m in a different league. It’s been good, but it’s been a lot of work.”
Pinkel said he and his staff have been studying and analyzing their new opponents and working on stretching Missouri’s recruiting territory to “Florida, Atlanta and South Georgia.”
Missouri and Texas A&M play their SEC football openers Sept. 8: the Tigers vs. Georgia in Columbia, Mo., and the Aggies vs. Florida in College Station, Texas. Missouri was 8-5 last season. Texas A&M was 7-6 and changed coaches after the season, hiring Sumlin from Houston.
“After I took the job, everybody shakes my hand and goes, “Man, wow, whew,’” Sumlin said. “It’s like [they thought] I didn’t know we were in the SEC when I took the job. We understand the challenge. We’ll probably understand it a whole lot more six months from now.”
Sumlin has talked with a friend, Nebraska coach Bo Pelini, about adapting to a new league. The Cornhuskers moved from the Big 12 to the Big Ten last year.
The addition of Texas A&M and Missouri has presented a myriad of issues that the 14-team SEC continues to sort out at this week’s meetings — particularly regarding new scheduling models for football and basketball and a new format for the conference basketball tournament.
Mike Alden, Missouri’s athletic director, said he has been impressed with the long-term, strategic way in which his new league handles its business.
“As a newbie in the league, what I was listening to [Wednesday] was very collegial,” Alden said. “There was a lot of thought not just about what’s happening today but about how these kinds of issues in scheduling can benefit the league 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now. That’s pretty impressive to me as a new guy coming into the room.”
Alden also thinks SEC fans — specifically Georgia fans — will be impressed when the first league game is played in Columbia, Mo.
“When we have an opportunity to match up against the University of Georgia, I think it’ll be just electric,” Alden said. “I think the atmosphere around our community and around mid-Missouri and around the state will be electric.”
Alden said he heard from UGA officials “about all these Georgia fans that are going to be coming to Columbia for the game and then ... drive down the road to Kansas City to see the Falcons play the Chiefs” the next day.
The presence of Missouri and Texas A&M at the SEC meetings underscores the flux in which college athletics finds itself, raising the inevitable question of whether they soon will be joined in the league by other “new guys.”
“I was comfortable at 12 [members],” SEC commissioner Mike Slive said. “Texas A&M and Missouri came to us and said they were interested in being in our league, and those are the kind of institutions we felt were appropriate.
“We weren’t then, and we aren’t now, in expansionist mode.”
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