Description
The Southeastern Conference (SEC) is an American college athletic conference whose member institutions are located primarily in the South Central and Southeastern United States. Its fourteen members include the flagship public universities of ten states, three additional public land-grant universities, and one private research university. The conference is headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama. The SEC participates in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I in sports competitions; for football it is part of the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), formerly known as Division I-A.
The SEC was established in 1932 by thirteen members of the old Southern Conference. Three charter members had left by the late 1960s, but subsequent additions in 1990 and 2012 grew the conference to fourteen member institutions. The league will expand to sixteen members with the upcoming addition of the University of Texas and University of Oklahoma, which are slated to join in 2024.
Members of the SEC have won many national championships: 43 in football, 21 in basketball, 41 in indoor track, 42 in outdoor track, 24 in swimming, 20 in gymnastics, 15 in baseball (College World Series), and one in volleyball. In 1992, the SEC was the first NCAA Division I conference to hold a championship game (and award a subsequent title) for football and was one of the founding member conferences of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). The current SEC commissioner is Greg Sankey, who has been the commissioner since 2015. The conference sponsors team championships in nine men's sports and twelve women's sports. The conference is successful financially, distributing $721.8 million to its 14 schools in 2022.
