The bottom line

Kramer was unflinching, yet effective, while with the SEC

I never knew Roy Kramer as a football coach. Kramer finished his career on the sidelines at Central Michigan, where he won the Division II championship in 1974, a few years before I began covering college sports. Having interviewed him countless times during his 12-year tenure as Southeastern Conference commissioner, I could always sense the coach lurking beneath his ever-present blue blazer. The 72-year-old Kramer, who announced his retirement Tuesday, displayed all the characteristics of a successful coach -- he was organized, he knew what he wanted to accomplish, and by God, just try and stop him.

Few people stopped the SEC from prospering while Kramer was in charge. Months after he took over in 1990, Kramer engineered the heist of Arkansas from the Southwest Conference. The addition of the Razorbacks --along with convincing South Carolina to leave the independent ranks -- allowed the SEC to split into two six-team divisions. Kramer then took advantage of a loophole in the NCAA phone book -- excuse me, rule book -- and announced that the SEC would conduct a playoff between its division champions. The lure of dollars from a conference playoff was the biggest catalyst for the league-hopping that characterized the 1990s. The death of the SWC and the rise of the Big 12, as well as the expansion of the Mid-American and Western Athletic Conferences, occurred because of the money available in a football playoff.

The College Football Association, the vehicle through which all the major I-A conferences except the Big Ten and Pac-10 televised their games, imploded in the mid-1990s because Kramer saw that the SEC could get more money and more television exposure on its own at CBS. He got called a lot of names after that decision, yet he never wavered. The same thing happened when Kramer yanked the SEC Championship Game out of Birmingham, Ala., in the winter of 1994 -- the same city that built the league palatial headquarters -- and moved the game to the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. Kramer was vilified, accused of being just another ungrateful, money-hungry businessman. He just smiled, crinkled the eyes behind his metallic-rimmed glasses, and did what he thought best.

Kramer was conservative in the sense that he usually favored financial gain over other considerations -- witness the SEC as the conference with the most schools on NCAA probation. But he was progressive in finding ways to make the money. That was most evident with the Bowl Championship Series, the jury-rigged method Kramer championed as a way to keep the primacy of the postseason bowls and fend off a playoff. Kramer's single-minded defense of such an untoward system always reminded me of the late Marty Feldman, the comic-actor who played Igor in Young Frankenstein, the 1974 Mel Brooks classic. When a doctor tells Igor that the hump on his back can be surgically fixed, Igor says, "What hump?"

Kramer never acknowledged that the computer-rankings system was a poor excuse for determining which schools should play for a national championship, not even this past season when the BCS formula spit out Nebraska, a team that went on to prove that it had no business going up against Miami in the Rose Bowl. Behind Kramer's belief in the BCS formula was a simple premise: As long as the bowls remained the primary method of determining a national champion, the major conferences would lord over the dollars that those games generated. A playoff would take control of the money elsewhere and most likely give it to the NCAA. Kramer, as he proved time and again, knew where the money was and how to get it. Over his tenure, the SEC increased the revenue it distributed nearly fivefold, handing out $78 million last year.

Years from now, when the BCS is dead and gone and recalled as a quaint contraption with too many moving parts, Kramer will deserve a better legacy. As a coach, he was a winner. As a commissioner, he made a lot of money. The bottom line, whether Ws-and-Ls or dollar signs, was his home.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Ivan Maisel covers the college football beat for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com.

 

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