The Sun Belt Conference is hosting its annual spring meetings this week and unlike many of the other conferences, expansion isn’t on the docket.

The Sun Belt Conference has little fear of expansion at this time since it's set with 12 members and the trickle down effect for it to lose membership would likely mean that every automatic qualifying conference would have to move to 16 teams.

While Sun Belt commissioner Wright Waters said he has a contingency plan should something like that happen, he’s not spending a ton of time fretting about the prospect.

“We’re all just dominoes waiting our turn,” Waters said. “And the only thing you can do is think of all the different scenarios and how you would react. Kind of do it in your mind and try to stay in enhancement mode and not get into survival mode because once you get into survival mode you start making bad decisions.”

So this week, the Sun Belt is discussing basketball, baseball and celebrating the conference’s 10th anniversary. In football, there will be talk about the new bowl opportunities, which are greater than the conference has ever had.

This year, the Sun Belt will have two guaranteed bowl slots and three secondary bowls. There also are more opportunities with the increased number of bowl games, which is now at 35. There’s even some speculation that a 5-7 team might be able to sneak into the postseason if there aren’t enough 6-6 teams to fill slots.

In four of the past five seasons, the Sun Belt has had a 6-6 team eligible, but that team has failed to go to a bowl because of the conference’s bowl contract. So, Waters' message to his athletic directors is to make their teams as attractive as possible to bowl committees.

“I think we got as much out of it as we could,” Waters said about his bowl contracts. “There’s a lot of hope for those six-win teams. Now there’s pressure on the schools to increase their attendance, show their people are proud. If I’m an athletic director at one of our football schools, I’m today saying, 'OK, I’ve got five road games next year, by God we’re going to have a function at every one of them and encourage people to travel. Show that we can travel and show these bowls that we can travel.'”

But Waters stressed that just winning six games can’t be the goal of his membership. While there are more opportunities out there, he still has high hopes that his teams will catch up to the standard that teams such as Troy, Middle Tennessee and even Florida Atlantic have set in past years and help grow the conference into one that does more than just the bare minimum.

“There are 6-6 teams and if that’s your standard of excellence then, you know, you're upset [if you don't get a bowl bid],” Waters said. “If your standard of excellence is something higher than that then you’re not worried about it.”