Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association The Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association ( SIAA ) was one of the first collegiate athletic conferences in the United States . Twenty - seven of the current Division I FBS ( formerly Division I - A ) football programs were members of this conference at some point , as were at least 19 other schools . Every member of the current Southeastern Conference except Arkansas and Missouri , as well as six of the 12 current members of the Atlantic Coast Conference plus the University of Texas , now of the Big 12 Conference ( and previously of the now defunct Southwest Conference ) , formerly held membership in the SIAA . History . The SIAA was founded on December 21 , 1894 , by Dr . William Dudley , a chemistry professor at Vanderbilt . The original members were Alabama , Auburn , Georgia , Georgia Tech , North Carolina , , and Vanderbilt . Clemson , Cumberland , Kentucky , LSU , Mercer , Mississippi , Mississippi A & M ( Mississippi State ) , Southwestern Presbyterian University , Tennessee , Texas , Tulane , and the University of Nashville joined the following year in 1895 as invited charter members . The conference was originally formed for " the development and purification of college athletics throughout the South " . They crafted a constitution , created an Executive Committee , elected officers , and set rules for : The league did not , however , sponsor much in the way of championship competition for its member schools . It did hold an annual track and field competition for a trophy , and it also held some basketball tournaments over the years , but apparently some member schools did not compete in the tournament during some years , and sometimes non - member southern schools were even allowed to compete in it as well . In 1903 , a single - game football playoff occurred , but it seems to have been coordinated more so by the two competing schools ( Clemson and Cumberland ) than the conference itself . Several other efforts over the years by individual schools ( rather than by the SIAA ) to hold a conference title game fell through . Most SIAA titles claimed by schools in various sports were actually more mythical in nature than officially sanctioned by the league . Indeed , some schools centrally - located in the conference played far more conference games than others on the periphery , making it difficult to form a fair comparison to determine just which team was truly the best , especially once the league began to constantly expand its membership . In 1915 , a disagreement arose within the conference regarding the eligibility of freshman athletes , the so - called " one - year rule . " Generally , the larger universities opposed the eligibility of freshman players , while the smaller schools favored it . As a result , some of the large universities formed the Southern Intercollegiate Conference ( now the Southern Conference ) , which used the one - year rule , while still maintaining membership within the SIAA . At the conference ' s annual meeting on December 10 , 1920 , the SIAA rejected proposals to ban freshman athletes and abolish paid summer baseball . In protest , some schools that had voted in favor of the propositions immediately announced they would seek to form a new conference . On February 25 , 1921 , Alabama , Auburn , Clemson , Georgia , Georgia Tech , Kentucky , Mississippi State , and Tennessee left the SIAA to form the Southern Conference , along with non - SIAA members Maryland , North Carolina , North Carolina State , Virginia , Virginia Tech , and Washington & Lee . In 1922 , the Southern Conference underwent an expansion and added six more members , all at the expense of the SIAA : Florida , Louisiana State , Mississippi , South Carolina , Tulane , and Vanderbilt . With the departure of most of the major colleges , the SIAA became a " de facto " small college conference in 1923 . In the 1920s and 1930s , the SIAA increased its membership with the addition of many additional small universities . The conference eventually disbanded in 1942 with the onset of American involvement in World War II . League archives were kept at Vanderbilt , the league ' s founding school , but the building housing the archives was eventually gutted with fire , taking countless irreplaceable items pertaining to the SIAA ' s history with it . Membership . Original charter members are denoted in boldface . Invited charter members are denoted with an asterisk .