Had Roy Kramer not passed away last Friday at age 96, he would have thoroughly enjoyed the last several days of college football chaos.
Five SEC teams qualified. Two Group of Five schools in this year’s College Football Playoff. No Notre Dame among the teams selected, causing the Fleeing Irish to decline any bowl invites.
It was Kramer, as Southeastern Conference commissioner, who created the forerunner of the CFP in 1998. It was called the BCS (Bowl Championship Series), which determined through a combination of polls and computer selection methods the top two teams that played in the national championship game.
“We wanted to create new interest in college football, and it did that to a far greater degree than we ever imagined,” Kramer once told me. “College football has always been extremely popular, but it became more of a national sport with people becoming more interested in what was going on in other parts of the country. Fans in Tuscaloosa became interested in what was going on in Oregon.
“We also wanted to improve and maintain the bowl system. The bowl structure is extremely important to all levels of college football, not just to the top three or four teams. Conferences that didn’t have many bowl tie-ins before, like the Mid-American and the Mountain West, suddenly had several bowl selections.”
Kramer’s role in college football history should never be forgotten. He truly loved the game as the head coach for 11 seasons at Central Michigan from 1967 to 1977. He had a record of 83-32-2 and his 1974 team won the Division 2 national championship.
“The best part of coaching was 3 o’clock every afternoon when you walk on that field and leave the world for 2½ hours,” he said. “It’s the teaching, the close relationships and the game days. Those things never leave you.”
His coaching career taught him to be a hands-on grinder, whether he later walked the upper deck of the Georgia Dome to check out sightlines for SEC basketball tournament fans or got all parties to agree on the creation of the BCS.
“Don’t ever get to the point where details aren’t part of what you do,” he always said. “If you expect people to take tickets at the door, make sure you know how to take tickets yourself.”
He retired from coaching at age 48 to become Vanderbilt’s athletic director in 1978. The myriad of challenges he faced running an entire athletic program, as well as serving on various NCAA committees, made him an obvious choice in January 1990 to succeed Boyd McWhorter as SEC commissioner.
It was Kramer’s foresight and mission to provide the financial rocket fuel that launched the SEC into the stratosphere it now operates.
Yes, it was the late Mike Slive, Kramer’s successor as SEC commissioner from 2002 to 2015, who worked to achieve the dream of the league having its own national ESPN network that debuted in August 2014.
But it was Kramer who first created a product that landed TV contracts worth a combined $600 million on three different networks. It provided an unprecedented flood of cash and national exposure for league schools in football and men’s and women’s basketball.
He expanded the league from 10 to 12 teams (adding Arkansas, South Carolina), and split the league into two divisions in 1992 when he created the SEC championship game.
Yet he felt college football wasn’t completely healthy.
“I thought we needed to do some things, particularly to put together some better matchups in some of our bowl games to find a way to increase the excitement,” Kramer explains. “The NFL was so strong and so big that we needed to find ways to increase the interest in the college game.”
Long before the BCS ran its course and gave way to a four-team college playoff that started in 2014, he knew the BCS was the first step toward something bigger and better.
“I knew there would be changes and change is good,” he said when the four-team playoff started. “Will the playoff work? It may result in less controversy, or it may be more difficult to decide between the third, fourth and fifth best teams than it is the first two teams. It’s a step in a different direction, and we’ll see how it works.”
Kramer knew in 1999 that a playoff system was inevitable. That year, a Swiss-based marketing firm offered a six-year deal worth $3.006 billion to manage a 16-team playoff starting in December 2002.
He declined, saying if there was ever a playoff that it would be run by the NCAA and not a foreign group.
Critics of the BCS said it protected the bowl system that fed most of the bowl revenue into the then-six major conferences.
“I felt the BCS was good for the game because we don’t help college football as a whole when fans focus on limited areas,” Kramer said.
He will be remembered as a visionary, a keeper of the game he loved.
“Roy is someone with phenomenal intelligence, courage and foresight,” former BCS and College Football Playoff director Bill Hancock once said. “He can see if a butterfly flaps its wings, how that’s going to affect college football 20 years from now.
“Many people get caught up in the moment, but not Roy. He understands cause and effect beyond anybody else I’ve ever known. He knew the BCS would be successful, and he knew it would be great for the game.”
Something great that led to something greater.
And for that, college football will forever owe a huge debt of gratitude to Roy Kramer.
Contact Ron at ronhigginsmedia@gmail.com