In his 10 years as SEC commissioner, Mike Slive has presided over a tremendously successful period in the conference, both athletically and financially. The SEC has won 62 national titles across all sports in the last 10 years, including the last six football BCS national crowns, and distributed $241.5 million in revenue to its 12 schools during the 2011-12 fiscal year.

"I've said often that if you're a historian and you move ahead 20 years and you look back," Slive said in an interview with al.com two weeks ago, "this has to be considered one of the golden ages of the SEC."

The future looks just as bright, as the SEC has welcomed two new members in Texas A&M and Missouri and, with a new four-team playoff in football set to begin in 2014, has created the Champions Bowl, a bowl game jointly owned by the SEC and the Big 12 that will match the champions of those conferences - unless one or both champions are in the playoff, in which case other conference teams would be selected. (UPDATE: The game was awarded to the Allstate Sugar Bowl in New Orleans on Tuesday.)

"We changed the paradigm a little bit, (because) we own the game," Slive said. "The window will be New Year's night, following the Rose Bowl, so it's a wonderful place for our league to be playing - on New Year's Day."

The SEC is also renegotiating contracts with its television partners - the league signed a $2 billion, 15-year deal with ESPN in 2008, and signed a 15-year extension with CBS the same year. Reportedly, included in those negotiations is the possibility of creating a conference network similar to the Big Ten Network.

"Of course, when we did those (contracts) back in 2008, we set the bar and we set it pretty high. Then new contracts come up, so the bar keeps getting re-set," Slive said. "So we are now in negotiations with our television partners about our long-term television future. So far, we're pleased with the conversations. Our hope is we'll be able to conclude these conversations by the end of the year and then maybe at that point, we'll have something that we think would be interesting to our fans."

Slive's thoughts on other issues involving the conference:

Q: Moving forward into the new four-team playoff system, we still have to decide how a selection committee is going to be constituted. Where are we in that process?

A: "We have several matters to finish up. One is revenue distribution, another is the sites for the semifinals, the rotation of the semifinals, the site of the championship game and the composition of the committee. We really haven't sat down yet and talked about the committee. Because time is of the essence, we've begun to work on some other things. ... The only thing we've talked about a little bit is the size, to make sure that it's large enough that when people have to be recused for some reason or another, we need to have (enough) people."

Q: Do you see the four-team playoff being something that's continually re-evaluated and perhaps expanded?

A: "No. I think the four-team playoff is what we have and what we're going to have."

Q: As good as the last 10 years have been in the SEC, you always want to grow. How do you grow from here?

A: "How do you maintain it? That's the goal. How do you think about the future? What do we do to ensure that we continue to be as good as we want to be? When people ask me about expansion, they say, 'How's Missouri doing this fall? How's Texas A&M doing this fall?' The answer for me is that I never thought about this fall or that fall. What I think about is the long-term horizon - 10 years from now, 20 years from now. So for us, one of the ways we can strengthen ourselves and ensure our strength is by adding quality institutions of this nature. I think that's one of the ways. We want to be able to make sure we provide the (right) kind of environment for our student-athletes. We want to make sure we graduate them. We want to make sure we've got enough revenue to support 5,000 student-athletes playing ball for the national championship. In the 62 (championships) we won, we won them in 16 of the 20 sports. One of the things about being a football league is that people think of you as a football league when in reality you're a lot more than a football league. But you don't get the focus."

Q: Do you think conferences are going to continue to expand? And if you came across the right situation again with other schools that wanted to come in, could you see this conference expanding again?

A: "I can't speak for anybody else. But there appears to be some stability. At least in the older conferences, there appears to be stability. We never had expansion as something that we were going to be aggressive about. I've got to tell you, we still haven't absorbed fully as you can tell from our scheduling. So right now, we're focused totally on fully integrating A&M and Missouri. I think we've done a terrific job in a very short period of time, but we still have some work to do. We're now beginning this fall to begin to work on a longer-term football schedule. In the early years, we were encumbered by non-conference dates and contracts, but they begin to dissipate as time goes by so it becomes a little easier."

Q: Do you see the SEC going to nine conference football games at some point?

A: "We vetted that out in Destin. We spent a lot of time on it, and there was an overwhelming majority (against it). The only thing I would say about that is in '14-'15, when the new playoff comes and the selection committee comes, we have to at least be sensitive and alert to make sure that our model, our formula, works for us in the way in which we want it to work. You can never be married to one thing if facts dictate that something else should be done."

Q: How do you feel about the 18-game basketball schedule?

A: "I like it. I like that we went to one division. I like the idea that we're playing 18 games. I think basketball is different than football. There's a tournament. I think we're better served. In the past, when you had two divisions, if you had a team that was really good at the top of a division that wasn't perceived to be as good, that team didn't get the kind of play that it should get. ... I think we have helped basketball by doing what we did. And with the 18 games, people like to see conference games."

Q: What's Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany like?

A: "Jim's done a wonderful job for the Big Ten. He's a very bright guy, very competitive. I think we both have very competitive leagues, so it's not a stretch to think that on occasion we're very competitive."

Q: How much longer do you see yourself continuing as commissioner?

A: "Last year, I agreed to stay on at least a couple more years and we'll see where we are then. People forget that it's not a unilateral decision. It wouldn't be just my decision one way or the other. So far, I feel like I'm making a contribution and I've got some things that I'm really working on hard that I think are going to be good for us long-term, and I'd like to see those to closure.

"You remember geometry - that's a long time ago for both of us -- but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I think that's a good way of describing this league. We've had just wonderful support, unanimous support, from our ADs and our presidents on all the major issues. I think there's an appreciation for the league by everybody, and it's really made my job easy in the sense that once we decide we want to go in a certain direction, then we're able to marshal ourselves together and try to get the job done."