A more than three-year process completed this month as Texas and Oklahoma officially joined the SEC on July 1, and Media Days this week in Dallas serves as the first league-wide event with both schools fully aboard as the conference's 15th and 16th members (the order of who is No. 15 and No. 16 depends on who you ask).
With all that work and waiting behind them, one of the top questions for commissioner Greg Sankey in Dallas on Monday was, naturally: When are Members No. 17, 18 and beyond coming aboard?
"Sixteen is our today, and 16 is our tomorrow," Sankey said.
The SEC would all but certainly remain at 14 members today had the Red River Rivals not sought a lifeboat out of the Big 12, and Sankey has continually poked at the Big Ten's corresponding additions of UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington as a point of pride -- that the SEC didn't have to explode its map beyond the point of human logic to add two of the top brands outside of the Power 2 conferences.
In doing so Monday, Sankey also took a shot at the Big 12 and other conferences considering selling their naming rights to raise revenue.
"We know who we are, and the Southeastern Conference, we're the one conference at this level where the name still means something, the southeastern part of the United States, where when we expanded, we actually restored historic rivalries while adding only 100 miles to the longest campus-to-campus trip our student-athletes will experience," he said.
In an era where conference alignment has fully untethered itself from reality, Sankey was careful not to say the SEC will never expand again. But he was emphatic in saying the SEC is not in the process of evaluating potential expansion targets.
Still, at one point Monday he fielded three consecutive questions on the topic.
The first was in reference to Florida State and Clemson attempting to sue their way out of the SEC:
We're focused on our 16. I've said before at Media Days, I'm not a recruiter. My job is to make sure we meet the standard of excellence that we have for ourselves on a daily basis. That attracts interest. It's done that with the two universities that we have added this year. They're not the only phone calls I've ever had, but I'm not involved in recruitment.
The second was about the possibility of expanding beyond the SEC's footprint of 11 contiguous states:
We're focused on our 16, period. You've seen how we've made decisions over the last decade plus for contiguous states to join. I think that's incredibly wise and provides remarkable strength.
I'm not going to guess about what happens next.
And the third, on if "tomorrow" means the foreseeable future or forever:
So the last three questions are a part of the reality, which is I've responded now three times where our focus lies. Our focus is on our 16 members. I have a responsibility to pay attention, and I'm certainly not going to fuel speculation on what happens next.
We can certainly remain at 16 for a long, long time and be incredibly successful.
One under-discussed factor in regards to this ever-present topic is that 16 is the last "round" number for a conference, similar to how our country stopped expanding when we got to 50 states. Sixteen is the largest number one can wrap their arms around: 16 teams to a conference tournament, easily divisible into eight and four if need be. Anything beyond that and, well, we can ask the ACC and Big Ten how they plan to make it work.
But that's a secondary factor. If a school with a brand strong enough to elevate the existing 16 schools makes itself available, the SEC will presumably evaluate and move forward.
Considering how happy, how complete the SEC seems two weeks into its 16-team era, though, that's going to be an extremely high bar.