There is enough good info in this I thought it needed it's own thread.
The FSU/SEC courtship over the past 80 years I was familiar with-especially in 1990 when the SEC expanded with Arkansas and South Carolina. I'd never heard that the SEC was serious about Miami, both in 1990 and in the 1940's.
Key takeaways.
-the 1990 SEC expansion had six targets. Arkansas, Texas, Texas A&M, Miami, FSU, and South Carolina.
-FSU was talking to the SEC and ACC in 1990. The football side wanted the SEC, but the academics and basketball side wanted the ACC. They wanted to the raise the profile of the basketball program and the academics liked being associated with the more prestigious schools in the ACC. Bobby Bowden probably could have forced his opinion that the SEC was the better choice, but he chose to let the AD and president handle everything.
-After FSU passed on the SEC, the SEC had a two hour meeting with Miami to gauge interest. But Miami had already started talks with the Big East after Penn State jumped to the Big Ten. Again, university fit was the deciding factor. Miami is a private school with most of it's alumni in the northeast, so they felt more at home with the Big East than with agricultural state schools in small Southern towns.
-Miami also wanted to go to the ACC in 1990, but the ACC schools only wanted FSU.
Personal observation, I've always thought the FSU ( plus Clemson ) belongs in the SEC and Notre Dame belongs in the Big Ten, and I still do. Miami and the SEC just makes no sense to me outside of geography.
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The truth is, Miami and Florida State wanted to become members of the SEC for a very long time.
The Hurricanes, who held their first varsity competition in 1927 and played in the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association from 1929 through 1941, attended SEC meetings in Gainesville, Fla., as early as 1938. At one point, school officials were pushing to replace Sewanee as the 13th team in the league. The Tigers, now in the Division III ranks, left the SEC in 1940.
By the late 1940s, Miami president Bowman F. Ashe had conversations with presidents at Kentucky and Florida about joining the league. SEC commissioner Bernie Moore met with Miami officials in 1949. But during a vote to expand on Dec. 10, 1949, Florida and Kentucky’s push to include Miami was shot down 7-3. Tennessee, Georgia and Vanderbilt supported Miami’s cause, Miami News columnist Morris McLemore wrote at the time.
By 1960, FSU, which brought back football in 1947, had joined the discussion on potential SEC expansion. But that same year, the SEC voted 8-3 to shut down Florida’s push to expand the league to 14 members with Miami and Florida State as candidates, according to the Associated Press. Three years later, FSU president Gordon V. Blackwell sent a letter to Georgia Tech president Ed Harrison seeking help to get into the SEC.
By 1965, Miami coach Charlie Tate was telling reporters the Hurricanes were no longer interested in SEC membership. That wasn’t the case for FSU. The Seminoles kept pushing, but the SEC never budged, preferring to keep the league at 10 teams after Tulane and Georgia Tech left.
After going 40-71-1 against the SEC before Howard Schnellenberger’s arrival in 1979, the Hurricanes put together a 12-7 record against the league through the 1989 season. The Seminoles went 13-13-1 against the SEC under Bobby Bowden from 1977 through 1989.
It wasn’t until 1989 reports surfaced that the SEC was interested in building a 16-team super league with independents Miami, Florida State and South Carolina and Texas, Texas A&M and Arkansas from the Southwest Conference as the primary targets. A year later, the SEC approved expansion, and Kramer went to work.
Arkansas became the first school to agree to join the SEC, in August 1990, but the Seminoles always felt like the No. 1 target. They took their time and knew the SEC would wait for them to decide.
“Twenty-five years ago we’d have done back flips and said, ‘We don’t even want to see the plans, let’s sign it,’” Bowden said in June 1990. “Now, we’re at a point where we’d have to see how we come out of it, because we’re coming out pretty good right now the way we are. It would be mighty hard to decline.”
Hogan said FSU could afford to take its time because it was “the hottest brand in the game.”
Miami, Florida State and the SEC: Inside a long road of rumors and what-ifs
How different would the college football landscape look today if Miami and/or Florida State had joined the SEC in the early 1990s?
theathletic.com
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