Enjoy The College Football Playoffs This Season And Forever More, But Never Forget Roy Kramer

By GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor

It all started in Destin.

Mainly because it was destiny, that of Roy Kramer.

All those bowls back in the day were full of so much pageantry and history and tradition and parades. They were great, but too often they couldn’t decide a true national champion. And Kramer, a quiet maverick, wanted change.

So, as the Southeastern Conference Spring Meetings were wrapping in June of 1990, SEC commissioner Roy Kramer, a former coach, quietly tossed a bomb over the secondary and the media. And he changed the college football world forever.

Kramer died Thursday at the age of 96. He lived to see the two-team playoff of 1998 that he started expand to 12 teams last year – something few ever saw coming.

I’m so excited about “Roy Kramer: A Vision for the SEC” debuting on @SECNetwork Wednesday 7 PM ET. Commissioner Kramer changed the fabric of collegiate athletics, from divisions and the birth of the SEC title game to the birth of the BCS. What a privilege it was to interview him. pic.twitter.com/Q5HJgblXun

— Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) July 19, 2023

A half-hour documentary of Kramer’s career premiered in the summer of 2023 on the SEC Network called “Roy Kramer: A Vision For the SEC.” But it should have been at least an hour, and it should be called “A Vision For College Football.”

If you can find it, watch it. Surely, the SEC Network will be repeating it.

“It was such a tremendous experience going to Maryville, Tennessee (Kramer’s hometownn), to visit with Mr. Kramer,” ESPN’s Ryan McGee said at the time. McGee worked on the project that was done by Raycom Sports.

“What really struck me was that in the middle of a day-long conversation about the SEC, BCS and the championship games, all of that, he was most excited to talk about his time as a coach,” McGee said.

Kramer died just two days before the 34th SEC Championship Game between No. 3 Georgia (11-1, 7-1 SEC) and No. 9 Alabama (10-2, 7-1) on Saturday (3 p.m., ABC). The game he started remains a huge money maker, despite the 12-team playoff that it led to making it less and less significant.

He is the talk of the town, the country, Washington D.C. and ESPN’s GameDay:https://t.co/iJMAbG6uhh

— Glenn Guilbeau (@SportBeatTweet) December 5, 2025

That game with its first edition on Dec. 5, 1992, in Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama, is what got the ball spinning to the first Bowl Championship Series playoff game in the 1998 season when Tennessee beat Florida State in the Fiesta Bowl.

That day in Destin, amid a series of routine announcements during one of Kramer’s daily addresses to a small number of sun-bathed reporters, he said matter of factly:

“After meeting with the athletic directors and presidents, the conference will be expanding by two schools to 12 next year. And we’ll go to divisions.”

Bam!

“What’d he say? Did he say the league is expanding?”, then-Memphis Commercial Appeal columnist Ron Higgins remembers saying. “What?”

Only Kramer and the SEC presidents and athletic directors knew of his impending, cataclysmic conference shift. There were no leaks on social media. “Internet” was not quite a popular word yet.

“The presidents voted unanimously to look at schools that might be interested,” Kramer told me in 2012 for a USA TODAY story. “We didn’t want to invite anybody. We wanted to see who was interested first.”

It was soon announced that Arkansas and South Carolina would join the SEC, bringing the league to 12 teams with six in the West and six in the East for the 1992 season.

But that little playoff part was most intriguing. Kramer had located a somewhat forgotten NCAA rule. It said if a conference went to 12 teams it could then form two divisions and have a championship game. Kramer read that as “PLAYOFF.”

Other conferences quickly copied the Kramer Doctrine. The Atlantic Coast, the Big Ten, the Bit 12, the Pacific-12, the Mid-American and others soon added league championship games. They’re all over the TV as we speak.

Without Kramer, it wouldn’t have happened as quickly as it did.

Kramer, who was born on Oct. 30, 1929, in Maryville, coached high school football before serving as the head coach of Central Michigan from 1967-77. He was Vanderbilt’s athletic director from 1978-90 and the SEC commissioner from 1990-2002.

“People forget how great he was,” McGee said. “He became genuinely emotional when we started digging through the files of his high school teams and of Central Michigan. Visionary business acumen aside, he loves football first and foremost.”

Kramer was not slick and talking-points trained like so many yuppy-like, metrics-mantra commissioners today, but he knew how to get things done – sometimes deftly.

“I was quiet about it,” Kramer told me of that time leading up to that day in Destin. “But it kind of ended up being sort of a big time statement that day.”

Sort of?

“That day” and for years, decades and generations to come.

“College football needed a playoff,” he said. “It needed one for years.”

Thanks, Roy. And R.I.P.