Georgia Tech’s journey from SEC to independence to ACC — and a Big Ten dalliance?

ATLANTA — Bobby Dodd has been described as a principled, charismatic leader who had earned the trust of the people at Georgia Tech. That included his players, who sat before him in the football team meeting room on a Friday afternoon as Dodd told them about making what might have been the worst decision of his career.

Few people realized that at the time. Fewer people might have understood the reason. Dodd tried to explain it to his players: The SEC had a rule that allowed schools to recruit an excess number of players and then run off the ones they didn’t want to keep. Georgia Tech refused to do that.

“We can’t compete in a league where this is being done,” Dodd told his team, as recalled by Bill Curry, then a junior offensive lineman.

And so Georgia Tech, a charter member of the SEC in 1933, pulled out Jan. 24, 1964. The dramatic move, which followed a failed effort to change SEC rules, sent Georgia Tech on a long, often rocky, conference affiliation journey that might not be complete.

An effort to get back into the SEC, only to be turned away. An era of independence. Finding a home in the ACC. A dalliance with the Big Ten, which had more substance to it than maybe believed. And now the uncertain future of the ACC, as Georgia Tech also pushes to return to national prominence.

“It’s a topic that is incredibly complicated. It covers 60 years,” said Wes Durham, who was the school’s radio voice from 1995 to 2013. “It’s a fascinating history when you think about it. It really is. And they’ve had some personalities there that really helped and made it a better place. And they had people who probably thought they could re-spark the storybook (history of Georgia Tech). Then the landscape changed under their feet.”

Bill Curry played at Georgia Tech under Bobby Dodd and then was the Yellow Jackets’ coach in the 1980s. (Michael Wade / Icon Sportswire via AP)

Leaving the SEC

The Yellow Jackets — or Engineers, as they commonly were called in newspaper stories at the time — had a storied history in the SEC. They won five football conference titles, the last one coming in 1952 when they also won the national title.

Dodd, a quarterback and three-sport star at Tennessee, arrived at Georgia Tech in 1931 as an assistant coach. He became the head coach in 1945, then the athletic director four years later and for decades was Georgia Tech.

“Bobby Dodd had this great personality, he was an excellent speaker, he felt so at ease in front of a microphone. He was a country boy from Tennessee but spent his whole career in Atlanta,” said Mitch Ginn, a Georgia Tech alum born in 1960. “But he made the biggest mistake ever when he gambled the whole program on a rule that, to me, he could have just lived with and tried to live within the system.”

That was the SEC’s “140 rule,” which limited the number of scholarships each school could offer per year, including a cap of 45 football and men’s basketball scholarships. Many coaches got around it by cutting players they didn’t want anymore. Dodd refused to do that.

“There are schools that are signing 60 student-athletes and then running half of them off every year. And we don’t do that,” Dodd told his players at that 1964 meeting, Curry said. “If we sign you, we’re going to keep you. If you’re not a good football player, then that’s my fault, not your fault, because I invited you here.”

There were other issues with the SEC. Georgia Tech and Alabama — fans and head coaches — engaged in a public feud after a 1961 game when Georgia Tech’s Chick Graning was hit by Alabama’s Darwin Holt on what appeared to be a dirty play. The SEC also shared bowl and television revenue (very little at the time), and Georgia Tech might have preferred to go independent and keep its own for itself. Later events showed the fallacy of that, so it really, at least publicly, did come down to the “140 rule” and the bigger picture it created: Georgia Tech doing things right and the SEC not going along.

Dodd wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Hugh Kirkman, Class of 1927, wrote Bob Wallace of the Georgia Tech alumni association on Oct. 3, 1963: “I am in complete agreement with you that Tech would be better off as an independent. I think that the conference furnishes nothing to Tech, quite the contrary is the case. I am for anything that will increase the distance between Tech and everything represented by the likes of Paul Bryant.”

Dodd lobbied his peers and SEC presidents to get the rule changed. But he failed in a dramatic series of days chronicled by Ginn in his 2011 article for the school’s alumni magazine: “The day Tech sports changed forever.”

Georgia Tech president Edwin D. Harrison delivered the news to the dozen other SEC presidents and chancellors in a two-minute speech. In a news conference afterward, he said the school would continue to play “our traditional rivals, Tennessee, Auburn and Georgia.” Asked whether Tech would return if the SEC changed the rule, he said, “I’d hate to go through this again.”

The SEC did change the rule nine years later.

“It’s just something he decided to take on and do. And everybody just went along and went with it,” Ginn said. “He had backed himself into a corner. So he and the president pulled out of the conference. The gamble didn’t pay off.”

Trying to return to SEC

For a few years, independence suited Georgia Tech. It still played Georgia and the other traditional rivals and added fellow independent Notre Dame: The final game in the movie “Rudy” is against Georgia Tech.

There were plenty of other independents in those days: Pittsburgh’s chancellor, Edwin Litchfield, wrote Harrison in September 1963, advising on what their experience was like and suggesting a partnership with like-minded independents Syracuse, West Virginia and Penn State. They could exchange confidential information on every athlete receiving aid, allowing them to essentially be a check on each other if they were taking shortcuts. The letter, found in Harrison’s papers at the Georgia Tech archives, concluded: “Perhaps the time may come when you would care to discuss a possible relationship between our institutions.”

(It only took 48 years for Georgia Tech, Pittsburgh and Syracuse to come together.)

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During the first three years of independence, Georgia Tech went 7-3, 7-3-1 and then 9-2-1, making the Orange Bowl in Dodd’s final game as coach. He turned the program over to assistant Bud Carson, but the team endured three consecutive losing seasons, and Dodd fired Carson after five years. Attendance slipped, and by the early 1970s, the athletic department began running deficits.

Dodd wanted back in the SEC.

“We need the conference and the conference needs us,” Dodd said in an interview with the UPI. He also estimated that 90 percent of Tech alumni wanted back in the SEC.

There was support from an unexpected source: Bryant, who said he “hoped and prayed Tech would get back in before I got out of coaching.” Florida athletic director Ray Graves was also supportive: “Tech belongs in the SEC and never should have left in the first place.”

But support elsewhere was lukewarm. The SEC was at 10 schools — Tulane left two years after Georgia Tech — and the league wasn’t crazy about other expansion candidates. Florida State long wanted in the league — seeking to replace Georgia Tech in 1964 — and was still available, but this was pre-Bobby Bowden, so the program wasn’t that desirable. Memphis State also badly wanted in.

Georgia athletic director Joel Eaves, speaking in November 1973 at the Atlanta Touchdown Club, presented it as a two-or-none proposal: “It will probably come down to whether or not they consider it best to expand the conference to more than the 10 teams or not. … There is talk of bringing in two instead of just Tech, and there has been discussion of splitting the conference into North and South or East and West divisions of six each if two new schools are admitted.”

The SEC had a meeting scheduled in Birmingham for Dec. 2-3. Memphis State turned out in full force with its president, athletic director, football coach and six members of the Memphis Chamber of Commerce. The Georgia Tech delegation, however, was zero.

“Tech knew it had no chance,” a source told Jim Hunter of the Atlanta Journal. Seven votes were needed in favor, and an informal vote taken days before said Tech would be “lucky to get the approval of even sister school Georgia.”

Dodd took it well: “I’m disappointed, naturally. But I’m not surprised. I don’t blame the SEC for not even voting on expansion. The conference is too big already.”

Privately, Dodd might have had a more direct feeling. Curry, in 1975, ran into Bryant, who asked Curry to tell his old coach he still wanted to sponsor Georgia Tech’s re-entry into the SEC. Curry carried the message home to Dodd, who shook his head.

“We’ll never get back in the SEC because some of the schools hate us too much,” Dodd said.

Georgia Tech shared the national title as an ACC member in 1990. (Mike Powell / Allsport / Getty Images)

Joining the ACC

Dodd retired in 1976 and was replaced as the AD by Doug Weaver, who realized some conference affiliation was needed. Georgia Tech had joined the Metro Conference for basketball and other sports, but it was unwieldy, and the football team was “drifting,” as Mike Finn, the school’s former sports information director, put it.

It’s not clear who reached out first, Georgia Tech or the ACC. But it was an obvious fit. The conference had seven members — South Carolina bolted for independence in 1971 — so it made sense to get to an even number and for it to be a good academic school in the conference’s footprint.

Georgia Tech joined the ACC in basketball in 1979 but had to wait until 1983 for football, in large part because of existing football game contracts. By then, Homer Rice had become the athletic director, and as a former AD at North Carolina, he brought some gravitas to Georgia Tech’s joining the ACC.

Winning helped. Weaver hired Bobby Cremins as the men’s basketball coach, which was the most important sport in the ACC. Curry was brought home to take over the football program in 1980, and he was so successful that he was hired away by Alabama in 1987. Then Bobby Ross was hired and kept the winning going: In nine months in 1990-91, Georgia Tech shared the football national title, and its men’s basketball team reached the Final Four.

“When they went to the ACC, they felt like they had been given a second lease on life,” Durham said.

Since then, there have been moments: George O’Leary won 10 games in 1998, Paul Johnson won double-figure games in 2009 and 2014, and the football program was consistent, going on a bowl streak from 1997 to 2014. Paul Hewitt coached the men’s basketball team to the NCAA championship game in 2004.

But the school also watched its in-state rival rise in prominence: Georgia, with a larger alumni base and competing in a more football-based conference, began dominating the rivalry. Football more than ever drove the economics of college athletics, putting the SEC in a much stronger position. It became a historical footnote that Georgia Tech had been a member of the SEC.

But could membership in another league have been a reality?

Georgia Tech football and conferences

Conference	Years
Independent	1892-1893
SIAA	1894-1913
Independent	1914-1915
SIAA	1916-1921
Southern	1922-1932
SEC	1933-1963
Independent	1964-1982
ACC	1983-present

Dalliance with Big Ten

Jim Delany, the Big Ten commissioner from 1999 to 2020, spoke recently with The Athletic’s Scott Dochterman about the conference’s expansion in 2010 (Nebraska) and 2012 (Maryland and Rutgers). The subject of other schools was raised, and Delany said, “There were many.”

Delany was asked specifically about two schools: Missouri, which left the Big 12 for the SEC in 2012, and Georgia Tech.

“I can’t talk about schools,” Delany said. “I have nondisclosure agreements, so don’t even go there.”

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At the time, markets were seen as the big get for expansion, so the Big Ten’s interest in Georgia Tech would be obvious: the Atlanta market. Georgia Tech never publicly expressed any interest in leaving the ACC. Then-president Bud Peterson did not return a message seeking comment.

But three people in the Georgia Tech athletic department at the time, who were granted anonymity to speak freely about the discussions, confirmed there were talks with the Big Ten. They never reached the final stages, with different views on why talks didn’t get serious.

“It was stopped early,” one former Georgia Tech staffer said. “There was an early enough indicator to say, ‘We’re not interested,’ that it didn’t really go further than that.”

There just wasn’t enough alignment within the school to do something as bold as switching conferences, especially to what was more a hypothetical than a real offer. The feeling was it would be an uphill argument among the fans and biggest donors, who tend to be more traditional and risk-averse.

Peterson, who retired in 2019, was a member of the NCAA Board of Governors, and when there were overtures, the school was reluctant to contribute to the chaos of college athletics. There also was respect for then-ACC commissioner John Swofford.

“It was an era where relationships probably still mattered,” one former Georgia Tech staffer said. “In an era when there was still stability among the people who had been in those roles for a long time. It’s probably flipped now, where there’s instability among the people in those roles, where one person could say, ‘We’re going to be in this conference until we die,’ when the next person might say, ‘I don’t give a (crap) about that.’”

Georgia Tech now has a new president in Angel Cabrera, a new AD in J Batt and new people all over the athletic department. And the landscape of college sports has changed.

Uncertain future

What’s next for Georgia Tech and the ACC? The concern is what’s to come if something happens to the ACC — Florida State has expressed some concerns about revenue — but even that seems a way off. The conference’s schools have a grant of rights agreement through 2034, and unless a sizable number of schools get together to challenge it, this seems to be a question for the first part of the next decade.

That gives Georgia Tech some time. The desire now is less for markets than brands, and Georgia Tech’s brand has been hurt by not winning enough lately. Brent Key took over last fall, looking to get the football program back to a competitive level, and Damon Stoudamire was hired this spring to do the same for the men’s basketball program.

The ACC’s grant of rights is part of the murky future, but there is a sense of being in competition with each other in the conference. There’s also a realization that resources are important. But Georgia Tech understands what it is, that it’s an academic institution first. And the grant of rights gives Georgia Tech a long runway to not have to worry about the future, so there’s time for the athletic department to make itself more of a desired brand and figure out what it wants it to be.

“It feels like they’re trying to make a newer and better connection to people in the Atlanta market,” Durham said.

Some point to the small alumni base at Georgia Tech as a hindrance. Finn disagrees, saying it’s more about a lack of continuity in leadership. That has disrupted fundraising, with relationships coming and going. The alumni do have tremendous resources, after all.

“A lot of Tech people are very successful and developed their own wealth through the years,” Finn said.

They just need something to feel they want to give back to.

It all, arguably, goes back to the fateful decision Dodd made almost 60 years ago. Georgia Tech could have stayed in the SEC, even with Georgia there. There are two SEC schools in Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama and soon in Texas. Still, that’s looking at it purely in the context of what’s happening now. There might be regret about the decision to leave the SEC — and not getting back in — but there’s also uncertainty about how things would have gone on the field if Georgia Tech had stayed.

“It’s hard to know what would have happened if it had stayed in the SEC,” Ginn said.

Curry, who still lives in Atlanta, was asked about the future.

“Georgia Tech is going to always come back,” he said, adding with some self-awareness: “That’s Bill Curry, the totally biased Georgia Tech person. We have very creative people not just on our coaching staffs, but we have creative, brilliant people who are highly successful with what they’ve done with their lives. And they desperately want to see success on the court and on the field and in the pool. They don’t want mediocre teams, and they won’t accept mediocrity. And that’s the reason Georgia Tech will always come back and dig out of these holes. We also dig these holes ourselves pretty regularly.

“I’m not sure we’ve ever felt too much about conferences because we have this confidence in ourselves and in our school. That somebody will come along that will really understand it and rally our troops and we’ll be competitive again. And we might be really competitive. That’s how we think.”

Editor’s note: This story is part of The Athletic’s Realignment Revisited series, digging into the past, present and future of conference realignment in college sports. Follow the series and find more conference realignment stories here.

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photos: Hy Peskin, Grant Halverson / Getty Images)