Mike Slive was SEC’s best commissioner, and Tennessee Vols paid for it
Former Southeastern Conference commissioner Mike Slive passed away Wednesday. Here’s a look at his effect on the Volunteers football program.
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When Mike Slive took over for Roy Kramer as the new SEC commissioner in 2002, Tennessee football was at its absolute best. The Vols were four years removed from a national championship, they were coming off a Top 5 finish, and they entered the 2002 season in the Top 5.
But nobody on Rocky Top could have predicted that the Vols would begin a streak that very year, one that still stands, of no Top 10 finishes in football. And yes, you can partially trace that streak to Mike Slive himself…for being the best commissioner the SEC ever had in football.
Slive, who passed away at age 77 Wednesday, took the SEC to new heights. What was already a top football program became a juggernaut that nobody came close to witnessing.
When he took over, it was hard to see the league becoming what it would become. The SEC had been run by Tennessee and Florida for the previous 12 years. The Florida Gators, though, were losing the architect of their dominance, Steve Spurrier, to the NFL. Meanwhile, the conference’s premiere football program, the Alabama Crimson Tide, was on probation. So were the Kentucky Wildcats.
Amidst all this, though, things should’ve been good for Tennessee football. They were primed to be top dog in the SEC with Ron Zook at Florida and Alabama on probation. It didn’t happen.
Now, Tennessee’s fall from grace can partially be traced to two hires made before Mike Slive arrived: Mark Richt to the Georgia Bulldogs and Nick Saban to the LSU Tigers. Richt closed off Tennessee’s Georgia pipeline while Saban dominated everywhere and closed off Louisiana.
Slive, though, did his part. He worked to reset the standards for all SEC programs. As a result, they were all off probation within five years. Meanwhile, his negotiations of TV contracts and promotion of the league helped revenue skyrocket. Teams had the budgets to make big hires and recruit everywhere.
After the Auburn Tigers went undefeated in 2004 and were left out of the national title, Slive would join the BCS committee two years later. By that point, his fingerprints were all over the league. Auburn itself was recruiting very well.
Florida had hired Urban Meyer and was recruiting at a ridiculously high level. Georgia never stopped recruiting. LSU was able to move on from Saban to Les Miles easily and still stack up on talent. Heck, despite not being able to coach, Ed Orgeron was recruiting and closing off the state of Mississippi for the Ole Miss Rebels. Meanwhile, Sylvester Croom was getting his talent as the first black head coach in the SEC. And the South Carolina Gamecocks brought in Steve Spurrier to replace Lou Holtz, who was eventually able to close off that area.
The result? Tennessee football, which could usually cherry pick elite players from each of these states, now had nowhere to turn. The program still had enough cache and was in a good enough location to get top-notch talent. But it required much more careful evaluation.
That didn’t happen. Phillip Fulmer missed on his two best recruiting classes after Mike Slive took over, in 2005 and 2007. No other class was in the Top 10. That decline combined with the arrival of other coaches and programs resulted in Fulmer’s ouster in 2008.
Then there was the disaster of Lane Kiffin, who went to war with Slive and the SEC. He was gone after a year.
And by the time Derek Dooley took over, the program was at its lowest point. At the same time, the SEC was rolling. With the SEC Network, the prepared expansion to 14 teams, and a string of national titles, things were getting harder and harder for the Vols. And it was all because of how great a job Slive did in building up the conference.
By the time he left, there had been an All-SEC national championship game. And then the College Football Playoff he constantly pushed for finally happened. That created another All-SEC national championship game.
Back in the 1990s, the Tennessee Vols could pretty much go into any Deep South state and pick out a couple of elite players, and they could wall off Georgia. After Mike Slive took the conference to new heights, that was no longer the case.
On top of all that, after he cleaned up the league, the Vols became the one big embarrassment with the Kiffin hostesses recruiting scandal and the Bruce Pearl saga in basketball. Slive handled those things as well as anybody could.
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Simply put, Mike Slive was great for the SEC. He turned the conference into the face of college sports. And because he did his job so well, Tennessee football ended up suffering. How’s that for a twist of irony.