You think Arkansas had no history before the SEC? Arkansas played Texas for a de facto national championship game in the old SWC back in the Nixon days. Arkansas was no juggernaut, but it was one of the top SWC schools. Played in an Orange Bowl under Lou Holtz. Certainly had a lot more history than South Carolina, which itself had been good enough to produce a Heisman Trophy winner, George Rogers, not that long before.

Your speculation is great, but it simply is not based on the realities of the times. As for the Louisville, Cincinnati, Tulane, Memphis, USM, UAB, ECU and VT thing, I just don't think you understand what the real state of most of those schools' football programs was in those days, how folks thought about geography and travel and most importantly, what schools like Penn State would be willing to do. There's no way on God's green earth that Penn State would have entered a conference that made it play road games at Memphis or Hattiesburg, even occasionally. Penn State and JoePa had reached the point where it was beginning to become reluctant to play even the Pitts and WVUs and Syracuses on a straight, home-and-home basis, because there was more money to be made playing home games in Beaver Stadium.

So it's nice to speculate that someone may have wanted to form a super conference and some of those schools would have been considered. The reality is that very idea was floated and fell flat as a pancake. Any conference formed with a core of eastern schools was either going to include just the eastern schools or, alternatively, would have added other powers like Miami and FSU and a couple other select and perhaps very lucky schools. That was the discussion of the day.