As Texas, Oklahoma join SEC, a look back at league’s original 1933 constitution

Monday marks the start of a new era for the Southeastern Conference as Oklahoma and Texas officially join the league.

The league has been hyping the July 1 start date for its 16-team era with a series of social media posts built around the message “a new era of more” in reference to the SEC’s “it just means more” slogan.

While the addition of Texas and Oklahoma is expected to widen the gap between the SEC and Big Ten and everyone else, the founders of the SEC probably would have been dismayed to see the league’s latest development.

“Since in our judgment the time has arrived for a more compact organization for the administration of athletics, it seems wise for a division of the Southern Conference to be made solely on geographical lines,” Florida president John Tigert said in announcing the formation of the SEC in December 1932.

Tigert’s comments came as he announced the resignation of Florida, Kentucky, Alabama, Auburn, Tennessee, Sewanee, Vanderbilt, Georgia, Georgia Tech, LSU, Tulane, Ole Miss and Mississippi State from the then 23-team Southern Conference.

Lexington Leader reporter Brownie Leach wrote the next day that the split had long been rumored but the push was believed to have been abandoned after multiple unsuccessful attempts.

“The late Southern Conference of 23 members was much too large and unwieldy,” Leach wrote in the Dec. 11, 1932, edition of The Lexington Leader. “This and the fact that the member schools were so widely scattered had been chief complaints of those who first sought to divorce themselves from the organization.”

After the split, Virginia, Virginia Tech, VMI, Washington and Lee, Maryland, North Carolina, Duke, N.C. State, South Carolina and Clemson remained in the Southern Conference.

While several of those schools retained geographic proximity to the SEC schools, the new league was so serious about avoiding the pitfalls of the bloated Southern Conference that it capped membership at 13 schools in its bylaws adopted in February 1933.

A copy of those bylaws is included in the collection of personal papers from former UK President Frank McVey housed at UK’s special collections library. McVey was elected the SEC’s first president upon the split from the Southern Conference.

Article II of the bylaws lay out a clear purpose for the new league: “The Southeastern Conference is organized to form a more compact group of institutions with similar educational ideals and regulations in order that they may by joint action increase their ability to render the services for which they were founded and for which they are maintained, by making athletics a part of the educational plan and by making them subservient to the great aims and objects of education and placing them under the same administrative control.”

The SEC remained at 13 teams until Sewanee left the league in 1940. Georgia Tech would depart in 1964 and Tulane in 1966. The league returned to 12 teams in 1991 with the addition of Arkansas and South Carolina.

For the first time, the SEC moved beyond its original 13-team cap in 2012 with the addition of Texas A&M and Missouri.

Perhaps Leach foreshadowed eventual expansion when he took issue with the league being called the Southeastern Conference in 1932, pointing out that would have been a more apt name for the teams remaining in the Southern Conference. While including Texas A&M, Texas, Missouri and Oklahoma in the supposed group of southeastern schools is not quite as egregious geographically as the addition of SMU, Cal and Stanford to the ACC or UCLA and USC to the Big Ten, it clearly was not what the SEC founders envisioned for the conference.

But the SEC of today already looked vastly different than the one outlined in the 1933 bylaws, adopted during the league’s first basketball tournament.

Boxing was one of eight sports originally sponsored by the league, alongside football, basketball, track, baseball, tennis, swimming and golf. The league was not integrated until Stephen Martin became the league’s first Black athlete as a baseball player for Tulane in 1965. The SEC did not recognize its first championships for any women’s sport until the 1979-80 academic year.

The 1933 bylaws banned freshmen from competing on varsity teams and prohibited any SEC school from using athletes that had competed in that sport at another four-year college previously. Annual dues for member schools were set at $50.

For all the changes in the SEC’s 92 years, at least one key facet of the league has stayed the same. The addition of Texas and Oklahoma only adds to that goal.

“Under the old conference there were too many teams to be played so that it was possible for a team with weak opponents and lucky breaks to win a southern conference championship without actually being the best team in the south,” The Lexington Herald wrote in a Dec. 13, 1932, editorial. “The new conference is composed entirely of states that will send strong teams on the field.”

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