UT is a member of the Southeastern Conference (1932), which it helped organize. UT has been a member of an athletics conference since 1896, when it joined the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association one year after its establishment by Dr. William Dudley of Vanderbilt. The significant achievement of the SIAA was wresting control of college athletics from the students, placing control with college administrators, and thus paving the way for standard rules.
In 1919–20 the SIAA had 40 members, with great variation in size of the member institutions. At its December 1920 meeting, the SIAA voted down proposed rules that an athlete must be in college a year before playing on its teams and refused to abolish a rule permitting athletes to play summer baseball for money. In protest, 14 of the 30 schools in the conference (Alabama, Auburn, Clemson, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi State, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Tennessee, Virginia, Virginia Tech, and Washington and Lee) met in February 1921. They ratified and adopted new rules and regulations, forming the Southern Intercollegiate Conference.
In the SIC the “freshman rule” basically banned an athlete from intercollegiate competition prior to completion of one year in college; the migratory rule prevented a person who had left one school from entering another school and immediately playing in intercollegiate competition; and professionals in one sport were banned from playing in another. In 1923 the SIC became the Southern Conference. By 1931 the Southern Conference had 23 members; again, with great differences in size of institutions.
Thirteen of the member schools (Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt, Tennessee, Sewanee, Florida, Kentucky, LSU, Tulane, Mississippi State, and Mississippi) met in Knoxville in 1932 to plan a new conference and then met in Atlanta to adopt conference bylaws and a constitution for the Southeastern Conference. Dr. Frank L. McVey, president of the University of Kentucky, became the first president of the new organization.
Three of the original teams have left the conference: the University of the South (Sewanee) left in 1940; Georgia Tech left in 1964; Tulane left in 1966. The conference was made up of 10 of the founding members from 1966 to 1991, when Arkansas and South Carolina were added. In 2012 the conference was expanded to 14 schools with the additions of Texas A&M and the University of Missouri.