Roy Kramer, the former commissioner of the Southern Conference who turned it into a lucrative national power and, from that pole, transformed college football more broadly by helping to create the much-debated Bowl Championship Series to determine the national champion that endured for 16 years, died on December 4 in Maryville, Therm. He was 96.
His son Steve confirmed his death at the hospital. Mr. Kramer lived near Vonor in East Tennessee.
Mr. Kramer, a championship-winning coach who became Vanderbilt’s college athletic director, was named SEC commissioner in 1990. During his 12 years at the helm of the show, he engineered the growth of conference revenue, derived from television rights — a $1 billion blockbuster deal with CBS — bowl games and devised other sources of revenue.
In 1990, he shared 16 million conversations with his schools; with Mr. When Kramer retired in 2002, it was a six-figure figure.
“By any standard,” Mike Tranghese, the former Eastern Conference commissioner, told The Associated Press in 2002, “Roy’s influence has been mind-boggling.”
In 1998, Mr. Kramer led a group of conference ambassadors looking for a new way to crown a national football champion. In its version, BCS, in No. 1 and No. The 2 teams in the region have emerged from a point system that has been calculated in the instruments of the media and the heads of the coaches and the three rows of computers, while also weighing the losses of the teams and the strength of the opposing team.
Charles Bloom, a former associate commissioner of the SEC, said in an interview that he and Mr. Kramer invented the formula and before winning the approval of conference delegates, they used to demonstrate how the system worked 10 years ago.
“He’s smart, objective and scientific,” said Mr. Kramer, who held the title of bowls coordinator when the system was unveiled in 1998. Answering questions about his complexity, he said that it is not more complicated than “thinking how a football writer can choose between a No. 9 and a No. 4 team.”
The bowl series survived, with some tweaks, through the 2013 season until it was replaced by a four-team playoff system. “Maybe it took longer than I thought to start,” Mr. Kramer told The Birmingham News in 2013. “It was a shot in the dark.”
Much to their delight, SEC teams won nine of those 16 bowl games.
Roy Foster Kramer was born in Maryville on October 30, 1929. His father, Russell, was a lawyer, and his mother, Alicia Kramer, was a homemaker. Roy attended Maryville College, where he was a lineman on the pedicle team and a wrestler. His education was interrupted by Army service in the Korean War, and he was stationed in West Germany.
After returning from active duty, he received a bachelor’s degree in physical education from Maryville in 1953 and a master’s degree in education from the University of Michigan the following year.
He began his high school career in Michigan, and his teams won three state championships before joining the Central Michigan University football team in 1965 as an assistant coach. In 1966, he published “The Complete Book I of Formation” about the well-known offensive scheme. He said the book “sold enough copies to buy a used station wagon.”
He was named the coach of Central Michigan in 1967. Over 11 seasons the Chippewas compiled an 83-322 record, winning the Division II national championship in 1974, he was named the Division II national coach of the year in 1974 and was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 2023.
Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, hired him as its athletic director in 1978. There, he was considered for upgrading his sporting abilities in his football stage; to initiate a steroid-testing system; and the bus of the women’s and men’s athletic departments.
While at Vanderbilt he was a member of the college staff who served a seven-year, $1 billion contract in 1989 for CBS to carry the men’s NCAA tournament from 1991 to 1997.
“For several basketball games he was negotiating with CBS,” Len DeLuca, former president of CBS Sports, said in an interview, “and you could see him deep in thought, and you wondered if he was listening. Then he accused you of a serious financial problem that revealed that he was not only listening, but two steps ahead of you.”
Mr. Kramer expanded the SEC to 12 teams — which now has 16 — by adding the University of Arkansas and the University of South Carolina. That would trigger a little-known NCAA clause that allowed conferences with 12 or more members to split into two six-team teams and hold a championship game.
“We had no idea that expansion was on the horizon until Kramer came into the AD room and said, ‘What do you just think about going to the ball game and having divisions?'” Larry Templeton, former athletic director at Mississippi State University, told the NCAA website in 2020.
Their surprise was genuine. There were no postseason bowl games in what are now the NCAA Division I Bowl Subdivision until Alabama beat Florida, 28-21, for the 1992 SEC title. That competition was a model for many other conferences that initiated games with their own title in subsequent years.
Mr. Kramer’s changes made the SEC a more valuable television property. He recognized early in his tenure that the SEC should have a lot of television coverage. In 1990, Notre Dame joined NBC Sports shortly after the College Football Association signed a new contract with ABC Sports, which gave it broadcast rights to most of the major conferences, including the SEC.
“Roy called me and said, ‘DeLuca, do you want to talk to our interviewer?'” Mr. DeLuca recalled. “It was just VEXO, but after three years, we lost the NFL, and we had an appetite for college football.”
In 1994, CBS Sports acquired the rights to broadcast conference football for $100 million over five years, starting in 1996, plus the rights to men’s and women’s basketball games.
CBS SEC’s regular-season Saturday slot has provided Alabama, Florida, Auburn, Louisiana State University and other schools with regular-season and broader national exposure than they get in CFA.
ABC held the conference ball game for a few years until CBS acquired it in a deal in 2001.
“There were a lot of reasons why this wouldn’t work, and some of them made sense,” Mr. Kramer told The Atlanta Journal in 2001, referring to the concept of a conference ball game. “But there was one main reason for doing this: We had to sell a great product.”
Paul Finebaum, an ESPN commentator and former sports columnist, described Mr. Kramer in a telephone interview as “one of the most influential people in the history of college football” who made many good decisions. But he also recalled Alabama and Kentucky under Mr. Kramer’s watch, from testing the NCAA to remedial and academic violations.
When news of the school violations broke in 2001, Mr. Finebaum told his radio audience, “Kramer reminds me of the piano player at the local pub. He’s a good and decent man. But, of course, when his friends come up the stairs to the pub, he conveniently turns his head so the official doesn’t recognize his presence.”
Within minutes, Sarah Jo, Mr. Kramer called the show “tearing me apart like a Great White shark attacking a school of fish at lunchtime,” Mr. Finebaum wrote in the Mobile Register.
Sara Jo (Emert) Kramer, wife of Mr. Kramer, 62 years old, died in 2013.
In addition to his son Steve, he is survived by his daughters, Sara Gray Mackin and Janie House; six grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren.
Two days before Mr. Kramer’s death, Alabama defeated Georgia 28-7 for the SEC championship. There was silence for him before the game.