(07-26-2010 12:35 PM)Native Georgian Wrote:  I have heard several distinct reasons, some that are consistent with each other and some that are not. I don't know how to rank them in order of importance to the people who actually made the decision in the '60s. But the various factors in play -- that I have heard about -- were:

1. Desire to play a national schedule ("intersectional" was the buzzword of that era)
2. Desire to play other colleges/universities with a similar academic profile (i.e., an easier schedule). I think there was a hope that by playing a softer schedule, Tulane could win more games and thus have a more successful team on the field. Which would result in more TV appearances, bowl games, etc. And in fact, that hope did yield some positive results (cf. the overall W-L from about 1970-80).
3. Recognition that, barring a Drastic Re-Evaluation of certain university policies in terms of athletic admissions, budget limits, etc., Tulane would usually be non-competitive in SEC football. I do not know, right off-hand, what Tulane's record against SEC opponents was from about (say) 1953-65, but it was very, very ugly.
4. Encouragement by the fact that Georgia Tech had just made the same decision a mere two years earlier, and a concurrent belief that the SEC was becoming even more difficult for a private-urban school, more academically-oriented than schools like (say) Alabama or Georgia than it already was before.

As much as the reasons for making the decision to leave the SEC, we should also keep in mind the absence of reasons that seem obvious to us in retrospect, but did not seem obvious to Tulane or to anyone else at the time. For example, only a few college football games were televised each week in the US in those days. I do not think anyone could foretell, in 1964-65, the incredible rise of "sports media" like ESPN, and how significant conference-alignment would prove to be in a media-landscape dominated by it (by ESPN, I mean. And Jefferson-Pilot, Fox Sports, etc.).

I think, by the mid-70s, both Tulane and Georgia Tech probably wished they could have gotten back into the SEC, but of course that ship had sailed. Georgia and Louisiana State were not about to allow their hated rivals to get back in the gate. Georgia Tech was blessed by geography and was able to slip into the ACC as a consolation prize, but New Orleans was just too far away.

I was going to say, Tulane was/is too smart for the SEC.
Same goes for Sewanee. (And GT, of course.)[/align]