What moron decided that Tulane should leave the SEC in 1966?

More Sports Board.


Uh ... Just joking, Chicken. Lol

even though i was on the scene at that time (in high school) i don't recall the specifics but the weenies flirted with de-emphasizing football more than once and prided themselves as the anti-sports movement leader in La. and yes, we took the mature road and continued to play them even though they soaked our fans every other year by required us to buy game packages in order to get a ticket to see lsu/tulane play. the texas schools, not just tejas universidad, are refusing to schedule a&m in all sports, not just football. they are basically contending a&m isn't part of texas anymore. a&m violated some sort of tejas "code" and so they rationalize their behavior as justified as opposed to childish.

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That has to rank up there as one of the dumbest moves in the history of college sports administration.

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A small hijack. USC left the ACC in 1971. That ranks along with Tulane.

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What moron decided that Tulane should leave the SEC in 1966?


That has to rank up there as one of the dumbest moves in the history of college sports administration.

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We should consider that a lot of things that are obvious to us now in hindsight were not easily foreseeable in 1966, three in particular:

1) successful lawsuit by Georgia, Oklahoma, etc. to take control of TV contracts away from NCAA,

2) flood of TV money pouring into college football after said lawsuit, and

3) gravitation toward negotiating TV contracts at the conference level.

These three developments totally changed the game in college sports. Until they happened, there wasn't really all that much to gain from conference affiliation. I think this is why there were a bunch of major independents back then, whereas they are practically extinct today.

Also, the growth of the NCAA basketball tournament with auto-bids for pretty much every conference and huge amounts of money paid for the TV rights, was a big game-changer. It also led to conference TV deals in basketball, although obviously less lucrative than in football. These also would have been hard to predict in 1966.

In 1966, Tulane probably (accurately) saw sports as an expense, not a financial asset. Staying competitive in the SEC would have been costly and might have interfered with the academic mission, given their private status and limited funding.

Obviously, we can see now that they'd have been much better off taking the path that Vanderbilt did, but from the perspective of 1966, I don't think it was a stupid decision.