SEC breaks into divisions.
The SEC, which had been a 13-team league at the time of its founding in 1933, had spent the previous 24 years as a 10-team conference after Tulane left in 1966. Meanwhile, in efforts to add some more structure to college football, the NCAA began implementing some scheduling rules to try to get everyone to play around the same amount of games.
In the 1980’s, the max amount of games a team could play was up to 11 before bowl games. There was one exception however. If a conference had their own championship game, a team could play up to 13 games total at the end of the season.
Savvy SEC commissioner Roy Kramer saw an opportunity in 1990 with the impending doom of the Southwest Conference. Kramer invited Arkansas into the SEC. The Razorbacks had always felt like an outsider in the SWC since the other eight schools were in Texas. With the SWC on its last leg, Arkansas accepted and agreed to join the SEC for the 1991-92 basketball season.
Kramer needed another team. Everyone else in the region was either satisfied with where they were at, or weren’t successful enough for consideration. Except South Carolina, an independent in football and a member of the Metro Conference for everything else. In early 1991, they too joined the SEC for the 1991-92 basketball season. The SEC had now grown to 12 teams and had successfully moved into two more states.
More importantly, the conference could now host a championship game. Kramer’s vision was coming true. Little did he know what the SEC Championship Game would become. His project was merely a means to get his conference’s two best teams in a prime time game with the nation’s attention.
To decide who went to the championship game, the SEC split into two divisions for the 1992 football season. The easternmost teams besides Vanderbilt formed the East, Auburn moved in with the westernmost teams.
Because of the break into divisions, many rivalries had to end. SEC teams now played eight conference games, so several non-conference rivalries, like Georgia/Clemson and Tennessee/Georgia Tech had to end. Eventually, the Florida/Auburn rivalry and Georgia’s annual meetings with Ole Miss had to end as well.
But new rivalries formed, including the one that is the topic of this story; Georgia versus Tennessee. The seeds had been planted in the 1900’s. The series began budding in the 1960’s and 1970’s. With the SEC’s expansion into 12 teams, Georgia/Tennessee had blossomed into one of the conference’s premier rivalries.
Early on that wasn’t the case, with Tennessee winning the first eight games after the division split over Georgia. In that time the Vols won the 1998 National Championship and two SEC titles. That just made Georgia hungry and they returned the favor with the pandemonium of the 2000 victory, the “Hobnail Boot” game in 2001 and the SEC Championship in 2002. With those three games, the rivalry was on.
And it’s been on ever since. Even in Georgia’s five-game winning streak from 2010-to-2014, most of those games had fans on the edge of their seats. The 2015 and 2016 games are also two of the best in the rivalry’s history.
The SEC Championship Game is one of the greatest spectacles in college football. Conference expansion has brought in millions of more dollars into the SEC and its schools with waves in 1992 and 2012.
You’d be amiss however, to believe that those are the only positives to come out of the SEC’s growth to 12 teams. The rivalry that Georgia gained with Tennessee is one of the best things to come out of conference expansion. The two schools prove that each year on the gridiron, the hardwood, the diamond, and just about everywhere else.