North Carolina considered leaving the Atlantic Coast Conference for the Big Ten or the Southeastern Conference early in the 2010s, former UNC chancellor Holden Thorp said Wednesday.

Conversations at the presidential level occurred, Thorp said, during the time when Big 12 members Texas and Oklahoma were considering a move to the Pac-12, which was seeking to add up to six teams. The move would have set off widespread expansion. Ultimately, Texas and Oklahoma remained in the Big 12 and the Pac-12 added Colorado and Utah.

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"We are pretty sure we could have gone to the SEC if we wanted to," Thorp said. "... I feel OK saying Carolina could have gone to the SEC if we wanted to, yes."

Thorp made the comments on 99.9 The Fan's "The OG" with Joe Ovies and Joe Giglio.

Thorp said he didn't have discussions with the commissioners of the SEC or Big Ten, but did have discussions with presidents in those leagues. When Texas and Oklahoma opted to stay, Thorp said those discussions largely stopped. He said around that time the ACC began discussion a grant of rights agreement to secure the conference. Maryland, which would leave for the Big Ten shortly, did not want to sign. The ACC members finally agreed to a grant of rights agreement in 2013 after Maryland's exit.

Throp signed that agreement in 2013. The ACC extended its grant of rights in 2016 and it now runs through 2036.

"If you want to see the ACC survive, that's a very important factor that might make it happen,'" Thorp said.

The SEC and Big Ten have emerged from the period of realignment as the most powerful and richest college football leagues. Texas and Oklahoma announced last year that they would move to the SEC, setting off a huge round of realignment. USC and UCLA announced last week that they are moving to the Big Ten, again fueling speculation that conferences, including the ACC, will be torn apart.

North Carolina is among the ACC schools with the most options. Thorp said there are practical concerns that must be dealt with if UNC decides to change conferences.

"For UNC to go without NC State would be a political mess because there is so much rivalry among those two schools in the Board of Governors and there's so much politics that goes on that for one of them to get the big payday from one of the big conferences and not the other would be politically very challenging," Thorp said. "I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but that's certainly something you prefer not to deal with if you're the chancellor."

"The other thing is you don't want to break up Carolina and Duke. If Carolina goes to one of these conferences and Duke doesn't and you're talking about a Duke-Carolina (basketball) game over New Year's or something like that, you know that it wouldn't be the greatest rivalry in sports," Thorp said. "That would be the end of it. In my view, these are both things you'd rather not have to deal with."

In the end, he didn't have to deal with either one.

"When Texas and Oklahoma decided to stay, we decided that the best thing for us to do was to try to make the ACC as strong as we can make it," Thorp said.

Duke, UNC, NC State and Wake Forest are charter members of the ACC, which was formed in 1953 in Greensboro. They were members of the Southern Conference together before that.