Good read on Sewanee. Very interesting.
I'm curious why Tulane and Ga Tech left the conference. I know neither would have been powerhouses, but they are both good schools located in the heart of SEC country.
The way I heard it was that they wanted to play a more inter-sectional schedule. Georgia Tech wanted to play some games with Notre Dame. You have to remember that when Tulane and Georgia Tech left the conference it was still the era of segregation in the Deep South. As strange as it may sound today, SEC teams did not play teams from up North because those teams may have had black players.
Also Bobby Dodd was the long time coach of Georgia Tech. He and Bear Bryant had a feud for many years. Dodd didn't want to be in the same conference as Alabama anymore. The Atlanta papers were really critical of Bear Bryant and there was the incident where Alabama's Darwin Holt slammed Georgia Tech's Chick Graning with an elbow to the face in a game and that further caused bad blood between the two schools.
A ROUGH DAY FOR THE BEAR
Tulane got to where it just could not compete in the SEC. The last game of the season for Tulane was LSU and it was year in and year out an LSU beatdown of Tulane. The most similar school to Tulane is, of course, Vanderbilt and I wonder why Vanderbilt still stays in the SEC. Well, I think I know the answer: MONEY.
Another interesting bit about Sewanee is that their long time head coach was Shirley Majors the father of Johnny Majors, Bobby Majors etc of Tennessee Vols fame. All of the Majors brothers played for UT except for brother Joe Majors who for some reason played quarterback for FSU and later became a lawyer. Another of the Majors' brothers was Bill Majors who was killed along with two other UT assistant coaches when a train hit their car at a railroad crossing one October morning in Knoxville when the three were on their way to work. Young Doug Dickey was the head coach of the Vols and he said it was the hardest thing he ever had to do in delivering the bad news to the coaches' families.
When Florida was stripped of the SEC title in 1984 there was some hard feeling between Florida and the SEC. There was talk then that Florida was going to leave the SEC and join the Atlantic Coast Conference. A lot of our people thought the ACC was a better fit. I thought it was going to happen, but I'm glad we stayed in the SEC.
