Miami, and Boston College who defected from the Big East in 2003. Even Jim Boeheim, who at the time had played or coached men's basketball at Syracuse for nearly 50 years, did not know about the change in affiliation before it occurred. Pittsburgh and Syracuse ultimately negotiated a buyout that enabled them to join the ACC in 2013. On September 12, 2012, the conference announced that the University of Notre Dame would become the conference's 15th member, moving all of its intercollegiate sports except for football, men's ice hockey, and fencing into the conference (the ACC at the time did not sponsor the latter two sports, however ACC fencing was reinstated in 2014-15 and Notre Dame fencing joined the conference). As part of the agreement, the football team now plays five games each season with ACC opponents. There remained speculation regarding the timing of the change until March 12, 2013, when it was announced that the Big East would allow Notre Dame to leave for the ACC after the 2012–13 academic year. At the same time that Notre Dame's future arrival was originally announced, the ACC also instituted an even more massive increase in exit fees. The fee is now set at three times the conference's annual operating budget; for 2012–13, the fee would be roughly $50 million. This, however, was not enough to keep Maryland from announcing a 2014 move to the Big Ten. On November 28, 2012, the ACC voted to accept Louisville as its 14th member, replacing Maryland. On July 1, 2014, Maryland left the ACC and Louisville joined the ACC. Southeastern Conference While the Southeastern Conference has made few changes, the conference's 2011 addition of Texas A&M and later of Missouri from the Big 12 Conference set off the second wave of major conference realignment. Several other schools were rumored as potential expansion candidates, but none of these rumors proved true until the summer of 2021, when the announcement that Oklahoma and Texas would join the SEC no later than 2025 triggered the next major D-I realignment. No schools have left the conference since the 1966 departure of Tulane. Other FBS conferences affected Mountain West Conference Three schools that had been members at the beginning of the realignment cycle announced plans to join other conferences (the University of Utah, BYU and TCU), and six schools announced plans to join the conference (Boise State University, San Jose