Southern Conference Split All About Business
Southern Conference Split All About Business
In 1933, the new SEC took immediate steps to bolster its bottom line, while the Southern Conference waffled, evaluating smaller, non-football powers for inclusion
Virginia Polytechnic Institute’s C.P. Miles, President of the Southern Conference in 1932, when 13 leading institutions left to form the Southeastern Conference, gave the parting members the following message, as quoted by The Associated Press (AP) and reported in The Baltimore Sun on December 10, 1932:
We regret you see fit to withdraw. I hope you may prosper and may your gates be bigger and better.
The understated adieu belies numerous issues that finally rose to the surface in late 1932, 11 years after the founding of the conference.
On its face, the split was amicable. Geography was cited, with the remaining members concentrated in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas and the departing members located in Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
Dr. Steadman Vincent Sanford of Georgia, for whom Sanford Stadium is named, was a leader amongst both the Southern Conference founding group, as well as those that broke away to form the new Southeastern Conference.
Spokesmen for both conferences cited eased administrative challenges with two smaller conferences as a key selling point.
Speaking on behalf of the new conference, Florida’s Dr. John Tigert said, “Since in our judgement the time has arrived for a more compact organization for the administration of athletics, it seems wise for a division of the Southern Conference to be made solely on geographical lines.”
Writing in the Los Angeles Times on the eve of the 1933 season, Vanderbilt Head Coach Dan McGugin asserted, “While [the Southern Conference] accomplished much in improvement of standards, it was too large for general conference intercollegiate competition.”
That, however, was just window dressing. At it’s heart, the split was about money and values. And football.
“Although leaders of each group emphasized the friendly regard for the other and the hope for the continuance of cordial athletic relations,” noted a report by the AP published in The Boston Globe on December 11, 1932, “there was a feeling among some Southern Conference members that the group which resigned had an eye on the commercial value of a compact body composed of several of the outstanding athletic teams, particularly football.”
Sore feelings and echoes of the Big East split
North Carolina’s A.W. Hobbs led a Miles-appointed committee that met with the departing members. According to an AP article published in the New York Herald Tribune:
A.W. Hobbs, of North Carolina, chairman, said his committee was of the opinion it was within the right of any group to withdraw whenever it felt it was to its benefit to do so and that there was no resentment against the others for pulling out of the conference.
Speaking solely, he said, for himself, Hobbs told the conference he was not deceived by any fine words that might be employed. “We are going to be two separate groups. You may talk about your accepting the same rules as we have, but we are going to be two different conferences. There is no sentiment connected with this event. We have gone along together as far as we could and have come to a parting of the ways. The Southern Conference is at an end. I want to say there is nothing wrong with athletics and all we need is common honesty.”
In other words:
There is no bad blood between us and the lying leavers who certainly never deceived us.
Right…
While the split was certainly geographic, the divide formed along the spectrum that at one end favored tighter academic standards and at the other increased revenue. Sounds familiar, right?
And make no mistake, those that prioritized academics were not fielding teams as strong as those that prioritized revenue generation.
“Figured on the results of contests between teams in the two groups the past fall, the Southeastern Conference is just about twice as formidable in a gridiron way as the Southern Conference as it now exists,” noted an AP article published in The Baltimore Sun on December 12, 1932.
During the 1932 season, the SEC teams held a 12-6-2 record in matchups against Southern Conference foes.
In most of the games the clubs from the Carolinas-Virginia-Maryland group, which is now the Southern Conference, were badly outclassed. Altogether, the Southeasterns scored 332 points to 175 for their opponents.
VPI, as Tech was known in the day, was not a particularly formidable team, but it was not bad either. The team finished with an SRS (Simple Rating System) rank of 35th, which put Tech in the 71st percentile, nationally.
However, geography, leadership, and on-field performance all conspired to make VPI a bridesmaid in this particular round of conference realignment.
The top Southern Conference football schools, from its founding in 1921 through 1932, the last season before the split, were:
Alabama
Tulane
Georgia Tech
Tennessee
All four of those schools moved to the SEC for the 1933 season.
The split left the Southern Conference a shell of its former self. Like the Big East would do when it was cannibalized following the 2003 season, the Southern Conference immediately went in search of new members.
Initial reports of the split cited Forest Fletcher of Washington & Lee, Secretary of the Southern Conference, as to the conference’s future plans to consider adding William & Mary, Davidson, Richmond, Wake Forest, and Furman.
Indeed, those 5 schools, plus The Citadel, joined the league in time for the 1936 season, raising the conference’s total to 16 teams, all within the Maryland to South Carolina footprint.
Differences in priorities
Immediately, upon news of the split, came reports of possible rules changes in each conference.
“Both organizations have committees at work on proposed changes in rules and regulations which will be advantageous under the new circumstances, and these probably will be enacted at the Southern Conference meeting in Richmond Jan 12 and the Southeastern meeting in Atlanta late in February,” reported the AP in an article published in The Boston Globe on December 11, 1932.
“It was reported the Southern Conference planned a revision of its rules with an idea of making eligibility requirements higher.”
Meanwhile, the Southeastern conference removed the ban on radio broadcasts of football games.
The philosophical differences with regard to the management of the two conferences came to the fore in February. As reported in The Atlanta Constitution on February 13, 1933:
The new Southeastern conference has as one of its major tenets, the making of the college presidents responsible for the conduct of athletics and their respective institutions. This has not been true in the past, the Southern conference holding its associations or faculty chairmen responsible.
This had the effect of suddenly and most sharply calling attention of the various presidents to athletics at their respective institutions. They are responsible, and in most cases lamentably ignorant of their athletic management.
This change marked the first time the presidents would be in charge of athletics, and this elevation in priority held many intriguing possibilities.
The Atlanta Constitution noted, in an article published on February 16, 1933 about a secret meeting of the Southeastern Conference presidents, that they “are literally ‘on the spot’ and their action is likely to be most important. The entire system of athletic control might be changed.” (bold added)
Takeaways
The circumstances around the Southern Conference split have been largely forgotten 90 years later, but the impact nonetheless remains profound.
From the outset, the SEC was an innovative league focused on maximizing its on-field product, as well as its revenue from athletics.
What remained of the Southern Conference, which for the next 20 years would serve as the precursor to the modern ACC, maintained a more traditional mindset with regard to the role of athletics as subjugate to the academic function of the university.
These differences have carried through to the present. The SEC inaugurated the first conference championship game in 1992, which was 13 years before the ACC played its first conference championship in football.
In 2024, Oklahoma and Texas will officially join the SEC, taking the league to 16 teams. The conference’s television deal - made possible by the concentration of great teams, passionate fans, and huge stadiums - gives every member school’s athletic department a major revenue advantage over most non-league foes.
Meanwhile, ACC member schools are locked in an undervalued media deal through 2036, the grant of rights for which is so ironclad that no school is likely to leave for greener pastures within the next decade.
On the one hand, it makes an ACC split very unlikely. On the other hand, it dooms member schools to an ever widening gap with SEC schools. And for schools like Virginia Tech, that were once in a super conference with most of those SEC schools, it is a bitter pill to swallow.