Where it began
The SEC started with 13 schools, three in Tennessee
Do you know how many schools were in the original Southeastern Conference?
The Southeastern Conference is about to embark on a seventh football season with 14 members. Adding Missouri and Texas A&M before the 2012 season gave the SEC its largest contingent since 1940, when the league had 13 members for an eighth and final autumn. Three of the conference’s original 13 institutions hailed from the Volunteer State — Tennes- see, Sewanee and Vanderbilt — but Sewanee withdrew from the SEC after the 1940 season.
Georgia Tech and Tulane were charter members of the SEC and stuck around much longer, with the Yellow Jackets leaving in 1963 and the Green Wave in 1965. The conference remained at 10 teams until 1992, when Arkansas and South Carolina were added, which resulted in the formation of two divisions that have been in place since. This is a look back at those who left:
Sewanee
By the time the SEC was formed in 1933, Sewanee’s best football seasons already were decades old. The 1899 Tigers achieved a feat that never will be matched, embarking on a train trip and defeating Texas, Texas A&M, Tulane, LSU and Ole Miss in a six-day stretch. Sewanee shut out all five teams on that journey and 11 of 12 teams overall during that season while going 12-0.
“If the Bowl Championship Series had been in effect in 1899,” Penn State coach Joe Paterno said a century later in 1999, “there seems little doubt Sewanee would have played in the title game.”
Sewanee produced consecutive winning seasons through 1918, but it became evident by the beginning of the 1930s that the private Episcopal university nestled between Nashville and Chattanooga could not keep pace with rising athletic powers such as Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, Georgia Tech, LSU and Tennessee.
The Tigers were 0-27 in SEC games when Alexander Guerry became the university’s vice chancellor in 1938 after serving as headmaster of Chattanooga’s Baylor School. Guerry agreed to the position on the conditions that regents and trustees ended scholarships for football and that the university consider leaving the SEC.
At the conclusion of the 1940 season and after having suffered defeats in all 37 games as a league member, Sewanee became the first school to depart the SEC. Baylor School graduate Rupert Colmore Jr., a tackle on the 1936 Tigers, was Sewanee’s only all-conference performer during its brief SEC history.
Georgia Tech
Legendary Yellow Jackets coach Bobby Dodd referred to the 7-6 defeat of No. 1 Alabama in Atlanta in 1962 as his greatest victory.
That triumph, which was sealed by a late interception of Joe Namath, was followed by a 37-6 win at Georgia, which remains Tech’s largest margin of victory in that series in the past 60 years. Those two wins capped a 7-2-1 regular season for the Yellow Jackets and earned them a bid to the Bluebonnet Bowl, where they fell to Missouri.
Georgia Tech went 7-3 the following season in 1963, and a 14-3 triumph over Georgia was its last game as an SEC member.
“Coach Dodd would hold team meetings and explain things to us, and he treated us like men even though we didn’t always behave as men,” said Bill Curry, who played for the 1962-64 Tech teams and coached the 1980-86 Yellow Jackets. “He told us what was going on in the SEC. He said they have been conducting tryout camps for years and that they would bring in 60 players and run off 30 of them, keeping the ones they wanted. The way they would run the others off was through sheer cruelty, running them until they would quit and go home.
“He told us he would never do that to us, and he explained that we were competing with people who offer 60 scholarships while we’re offering 30.”
Dodd sought to impose limits on the number of players SEC teams could recruit and keep, but he didn’t have the desired support, so the university elected to become an independent.
The Yellow Jackets remained without a league in football until 1983, when they joined the Atlantic Coast Conference, but they continued to battle familiar foes.
“My first year coaching Tech was in 1980, and we played Alabama, Auburn, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida and Notre Dame,” Curry said. “We had the toughest schedule in the Southeastern Conference, and we were not in the Southeastern Conference.”
Tulane
Entering the 1950 football season, Alabama and Tennessee led the SEC championship count with four apiece, while Georgia, Georgia Tech and Tulane had three each.
The Green Wave shared league titles in 1934 and 1939 and won one outright in 1949, but their success came to a screeching halt during the winter of 1951. Believing athletics had outgrown its role within the university, new school president Rufus Harris cut grants-in-aid from 100 to 75, reduced coaching salaries and downgraded physical education from a major to a minor.
Coach Henry Frnka (pronounced “Franka”) resigned immediately, and the Green Wave never produced another winning record in SEC play. In fact, from 1957 through its final SEC season in 1965, Tulane endured a wretched 6-473 record in conference contests.
The purpose for leaving the SEC was to lighten the schedule, former Tulane athletic director Rix Yard later told the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
“We had to have some relief on the field,” Yard said. “We had an 0-10 season in 1962. I remember going to (SEC commissioner) Bernie Moore and pleading to allow us to reduce our schedule. He wouldn’t allow it.”
Tulane’s final game as an SEC member was its third 62-0 loss to state rival LSU in an eight-year stretch. Tulane became an independent and remained that way until 1995, when the Green Wave became charter members of Conference USA.