. . . around 1977, but, after Bobby Dodd haughtily took his ball and went home abruptly in the ‘60s, leaving the Yellow Jackets’ conference coevals high and dry (for a year or two in there, the league had to designate out-of-conference opponents like Clemson and North Carolina as de facto S.E.C. contests to make the schedules balance), we rightly refused their attempted re-entry, so they went and joined the A.C.C. instead. Good riddance.

Clemson is a natural fit for the S.E.C. Their fans and their institutional culture have a lot more in common with us rough-and-tumble S.E.C. types than with those tea-sipping basketball pansies in the A.C.C.

F.S.U. was scared. There was no reason for the Seminoles to join the A.C.C.—-Miami wasn’t there yet, having just the year before joined the Big East—-and, since their other major rivalry was with Florida, it would have made perfect sense for Florida State to have joined the S.E.C. Fear is the only explanation that makes sense.

One other point in favor of Clemson is the strong tradition tying the school to the S.E.C. The early years of Clemson football are closely tied to Auburn: Clemson’s first three head coaches all were Auburn alumni, one of whom (Walter Riggs) brought football to Clemson. Riggs also hired John Heisman away from the Plains to coach at Fort Hill; hence, Clemson’s adoption of the nickname “Tigers” and a variation of the orange-and-blue color scheme that George Petrie brought to Auburn on account of Petrie’s having gotten his undergraduate degree at Virginia.

What is considered the renaissance of Clemson football began under Josh Cody, who as a player had been Vanderbilt’s first (and, I believe, still only) three-time all-American. Since then, they have had a whole host of coaches with connections to Alabama: Jess Neely coached there; Frank Howard and Hootie Ingram played there; Charley Pell, Danny Ford, and Dabo Swinney both played and coached in Tuscaloosa.

To top it all off, Tommy Bowden was an assistant coach at both Alabama and Auburn. Clemson has significant ties to the S.E.C. through the coaches it has hired . . . and that connection will filter down to the players if current Clemson scholarship athlete Jon Richt manages to make it onto the field for the Tigers. Clemson belongs in the S.E.C., far more so than South Carolina does.

…..Were after Florida State and Miami, HARD, to join. In those days, Miami was in the national title hunt every year, and FSU was dominating the ACC. Neither wanted to take on an SEC schedule every year.

…..Most of the SEC “hard feelings” about Georgia Tech are from the Alabama contingent. In the old days, teams like Alabama would have as many as a hundred and fifty scholarship football players, many signed just to keep ‘em out of the hands of any rival schools. Georgia Tech coach Bobby Dodd didn’t like it. He was trying to get players for an engineering school with high academic standards, and wanted a rule passed that if you signed a player, you had to play him. Bear Bryant was one of the most powerful figures in college football, and certainly in the SEC. Bryant blocked all of Dodd’s proposals. Dodd threatened to leave the SEC. Bryant called his bluff. Dodd and Georgia Tech DID leave. That’s why, 20-odd years later, there was such an uproar when the Bama Prez hired Bill Curry to be the head coach, without consulting any boosters or trustees. Bill Curry, a Georgia Tech grad, could not overcome that bad blood…

but upstart is not one of them. We were playing football before everyone else in the south…..only UGA can go back as far as we can. I remember reading about General Neyland saying something to the effect that UT would never travel to Auburn to play making some aristocratic snobbish remark but I can’t remember the quote and don’t readily remember where to find it.

it was written a few years ago and i can’t, for the life of me, remember what the blog was. i think i was doing random google searches for college football playoff formats and just stumbled upon it. sorry…it was a cool idea.

. . . and several Georgia fans feel the same way about Jacksonville (although I strongly support keeping the Cocktail Party there).

My point was not whether Birmingham was a neutral site; I don’t have a ’Dawg in that fight. My point was simply that the Iron Bowl was played there for many years, the same as Oklahoma-Texas was played in Dallas or Georgia-Florida was played in Jacksonville. Moving the game, for whatever reason, represented a break with longstanding practice. Maybe that was justified, but it still was a significant change.

Given that the Iron Bowl has moved from its historic home in Birmingham, and that Alabama-Tennessee frequently is not played on the Third Saturday in October, and that Alabama has ended the season against a team other than Auburn for over 47 per cent of the football seasons in Crimson Tide history, I don’t think it’s as much a heresy to suggest moving the Iron Bowl to earlier in the year as it appears at first. That’s my basic point.

Please understand that, in conjunction with this, I support moving the Georgia-Georgia Tech game to earlier in the year. We’ve played y’all at lot more times than we’ve played the Yellow Jackets; y’all have played us a lot more times than y’all have played the Crimson Tide; we have the oldest rivalry in the region, dating back literally to the inception of both programs; our founding father and y’all’s founding father were classmates who learned the game together; some of our greatest coaches (Vince Dooley, Erk Russell) had prior ties to Auburn; some of y’all’s greatest coaches (Shug Jordan, Pat Dye) had prior ties to Georgia; there usually are a couple of graduates from the other school on each school’s staff; whereas the Iron Bowl was interrupted for over four decades at one point, it has literally taken a world war (1917, 1918, 1943) or the death of a player from injuries sustained in a game (Georgia’s Von Gammon in 1897) to keep your team and my team from playing since 1894; despite last year’s aberrant outcomes, your team and my team have dominated our respective in-state rivals in recent years while maintaining a close series with one another. Georgia-Auburn deserves pride of place at the end of both teams’ schedules.

which is why Bobby Bowden made a comparison to FSU joing the SEC with Custer’s Little Big Horn strategy and said off the cuff in another interview something to the effect of “I am not gonna throw my team to the dogs every year”.