Question for SEC football historians

If that is true and not legend, you have to respect the passion.

 

In State's case, they often sold their home game and wound up playing in the opponent's backyard. This happened often, for years prior to 1950, with their games against LSU and they'd play the Tigers in Baton Rouge over and over.

 

The Georgia-Auburn series in Columbus has always puzzled me. That stadium, though architecturally interesting -- it's a replica of the Los Angeles Coliseum -- only seats 15,000 people. Sanford Stadium started out with 30,000 seats, and Jordan-Hare had 21,500 when they started playing in Columbus in 1951. Anybody know the story behind this?

 

http://www.rotarycolumbusga.org/about%20us.htm

 

Good stuff. Thanks for the replies. Now I'm curious as to the Ole Miss-Alabama history. Anybody know why they played so rarely for so many years?

 

It supposedly had much to do with an agreement between titan coaches of the era Johnny Vaught and Paul 'Bear' Bryant, to avoid one another's programs on the gridiron.

 

Never have been able to get a straight answer from anyone at Alabama, but that seems to be the case.

 

So why agree to a Sugar Bowl matchup back in the day?

 

If you look at the tenures of both coaches, the schools cranked up an annual regular-season meeting at just about the same time that 1964 Sugar Bowl took place.
There was a stoppage of games between the schools from 1944-64.
Maybe the SEC officials told both programs that avoidance was no longer an option.
An examination of the evolution of collegiate athletics will show residue, I'm sure, of particular programs that avoided each other but eventually were told they had to play.
Those countless back-room agreements eventually were unable to be sustained, within the parameters of a conference.

 

I don't know how the rest of the conference's rivalries worked, but from the late '50s until the league expanded to 12 teams, Florida's five permanent SEC opponents were Mississippi State, LSU, Auburn, Georgia and Kentucky -- the Auburn-Georgia games were played in consecutive weekends.

I think from 1956 until the schedule changed, Florida only swept Auburn and Georgia three times (a major reason why they had never won a league title despite some really good teams). They were ahead of Georgia at the half in 1976, with the SEC championship on the line, and gave up something like 28 unanswered points in the second half.

Then the other four teams would rotate over an eight-year basis in a home-and-home series (in consecutive seasons, no less). So while I was there from 1977-1979, I saw them play Tennessee and Alabama (Bear Bryant's last trip to Gainesville and a 40-0 rout) but never saw Vanderbilt or Ole Miss.

Plus, the last two games of the year were always Florida State and Miami.

 

Fla/Ga in 1980 was a doozy, too, with "The Catch" by Georgia's Lindsay Scott ultimately keeping Mississippi State (9-2, 6-2) from lassoeing a rare conference title.

 

The Golden Egg trophy was created as a sort of peace pipe between the two schools. Seems that sometime around 1925, an Ole Miss-State game in Starkville ended in a full-scale brawl in which fans and players were involved. Afterwards the two schools agreed to create the trophy as a way of cooling things down a bit.