Greg Sankey, the SEC’s Commissioner, joined Greg McElroy and the crew at Always College Football Wednesday afternoon to discuss the state of the SEC, as well as the expansion of the conference from 14 to 16 teams. Of course, Oklahoma and Texas are set to join the SEC in 2024.

Expansion, by nature, has not been SEC exclusive recently. The Big 12 is set to welcome a few new schools soon, and the B1G added USC and UCLA out of the Pac-12 to its roster.

Neither the Big 12 nor B1G will retain any semblance of a geographical “hub,” if you will. With the additions of USC and UCLA to the B1G, schools from LA and Piscataway, New Jersey are now in the same conference. It’s a similar story with UCF (Orlando) and BYU (Provo, Utah) soon to be in the Big 12.

Sankey told McElroy Wednesday that keeping a geographical standpoint was important to the SEC when adding Texas and Oklahoma. He dived into the topic on Always College Football:

“There is something still for us from a geographical standpoint,” Sankey insisted.” I’ve had branding specialists say ‘you could do what Kentucky Fried Chicken did and just use “KFC,”‘ so we could (have lost) the Southeastern Conference moniker to become the SEC. But that’s not really who we are. When we expanded, we added 95 miles basically to our travel, our longest trip. And our longest trip is shorter than the shortest trip that the LA schools will have in the B1G. We are still educational entities, we are still moving people from class to class.”

You can find Sankey’s full interview below. Talk about geographical importance starts at the 5:15 mark: