One of the toughest things that then-SEC commissioner Roy Kramer ever had to do was break the news to his football coaches: The conference was going to split into divisions and create a championship game in 1992.
The coaches, to put it mildly, were less than enthusiastic.
“The SEC will never win another national championship,” then-Alabama coach Gene Stallings said at the time.
Most of the coaches, like Florida’s Steve Spurrier and Auburn’s Pat Dye, wanted to know why the SEC would choose to play an extra game to decide the championship when nobody else was doing it.