NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Mike Slive helped propose a “plus-one” plan in 2008 to determine a national champion in football, but he said yesterday that actual change remains a couple of years away — even if an agreement is reached on changes to the Bowl Championship Series.

The Southeastern Conference commissioner said a decision on a new format could be made later this year but cautioned that it’s premature to speculate on what changes might be made. He said that conference commissioners, school presidents and athletic directors need time to analyze plans — such as one that calls for a four-team playoff — and discussions are needed among the six BCS conferences.

“Really, a lot of this discussion is premature, and I want to respect the process that we’re in,” Slive told members of the Nashville Sports Council during a question-and-answer session. “We’ve had four-year formats since we started. We’ve done it on the basis of four years, so each four-year period you have to sit down and decide what format is going to be going forward. So we have decided to sit down and talk about this from every different side.”

Slive said discussions among SEC schools began the day after Alabama beat Louisiana State in the national title game on Jan. 9, which gave the league its sixth consecutive national championship, and there is another meeting scheduled this month.

Those are just two of several meetings on the topic, after Slive saw no interest from his SEC colleagues or other conferences in pursuing a four-team playoff when he first proposed it four years ago.

The format of playing two semifinals plus the title game was proposed by Slive and the commissioner of the Atlantic Coast Conference, only to be shot down by leaders of the Big Ten, Pac-10, Big East, Big 12 and Notre Dame.

Now, the Big Ten has expressed interest in changes to the current BCS format.

“What would it look like and whether it’s actually going to happen, all of that is premature,” Slive said. “I think we need the time to sit down and analyze it. We need time to take ideas back to our respective conferences and … a decision to be made sometime later this year as we begin to talk about the … next format.”

Slive said close consideration must be given to how a new system would affect tradition, such as bowl games. He said the BCS still has two years left in the current format, leaving plenty of time to work through any changes.

Slive shot down talk of further SEC expansion. The conference added Texas A&M and Missouri as the league’s 13th and 14th members, and with the 2012 football schedules released only a few weeks ago, conference officials have plenty of details to handle already.

“We’re at 14,” Slime said. “It’s going to take us time to absorb. I don’t know if you realize how difficult it is to take two institutions and move them into 12 other institutions, whether it’s scheduling or the way we’re working together. So we have our hands full for now.”