Once upon a time, Urban Meyer and Lane Kiffin had beef on these streets. It's a little more complicated than a whole Odd Couple kind of thing, obviously, but that's what's most funny to picture in my head, so I do.
Mike Slive, who at the time had been the commissioner of the SEC for seven years, decided that enough was enough, and superstar coaches or no, he wasn't going to let a personal tiff between these two men go on any further. Here's how Tony Barnhart puts it:
In 2009 Florida Coach Urban Meyer and Tennessee Coach Lane Kiffin were having an all-too-public feud. Slive addressed the coaches as a group at the annual SEC Meetings in Destin.
His message: “Shut the #$%@& up.”
“I think the commissioner got his point across,” said a coach who was in the room. “He basically peeled the paint off the walls.”
That's not the only time that Urban Meyer felt Slive's wrath. After some (honestly pretty tame) criticism of officials after one of his games at Florida, Slive slapped Meyer with a fine of thirty thousand American dollars after some speculation that he wouldn't want to hurt the golden boy of his conference. But he did, because ultimately Mike Slive knew that it was a speed bump on to road toward getting what he wanted, which, it turned out, was SEC college football dominance.
Which he got! Mike Slive was the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference from 2002 to 2015, and during those 13 seasons the SEC won eight national championships, which is stupid and dumb and I hate it, but it's also what most people with just a cursory understanding of his career would have him hang his hat on. And man, that's a lot of damn championships. I get it.
But in truth, Slive's legacy will be much more about what he was able to accomplish in the face of frequent resistance from the Big Ten's Jim Delany, who over the years has always been just as insanely devoted to the success of his conference as Slive was to his own.
You can trace this back all the way to 2007, when the Big Ten and the SEC were jockeying over BCS bowl positions, and Slive and Delany both wrote pithy letters about each other's conference. Witness Slive's anger back in 2014, threatening to form a "Division IV" if his demands weren't met in NCAA negotiations related to being able to make his own rules regarding athlete compensation (among other things). ESPN even wrote articles comparing Delany and Slive, knowing that the rivalry between their respective conferences extended to their commissioners.
There was, of course, mutual respect between Delany and Slive, even if they didn't always see eye to eye. After Slive retired, Delany said:
“Mike had a great run,” Delany said Thursday. “They dominated college football for a period of time in a way that no one else has done in the modern era. Two, I think he’s had a really good effect and impact not only on the SEC but the college community generally.”
Delany, for his part, has the right to be a little irritated if Mike Slive gets sole credit for essentially aping the greatest idea that Jim ever had (at least in terms of a money-making venture), but both the BTN and the SEC Network continue to rake in ridiculous amounts of cash to add to the coffers of their respective conferences, and have kept numerous non-revenue sports viable through unbelievably lucrative television contracts.
And that's the really interesting thing about all of this. The Big Ten and by extension Jim Delany is an extremely powerful force in the college sports world because Delany has figured out ways to expand the income base of a conference that by all rights should be strapped for cash in a post-Rust Belt world. That football success hasn't followed in spades is irritating, but that irritation (and, frankly, by comparing itself to the SEC) has forced the hand of Big Ten football programs to take a long look in the mirror and consider what they needed to do to update their programs for the 21st century.
And while the Big Ten mined the SEC for some recruiting ideas (greyshirting) and coaching (Meyer, James Franklin, etc.), the SEC looked to the Big Ten for how to generate revenue, which they have been incredibly successful at. The trillion championships helps too, I guess.
Probably the biggest battle between Slive and Delany took place over the issue of the College Football Playoff. Mike Slive deftly got virtually everything he wanted in the creation of a playoff; the Rose Bowl was no longer really A Thing for the Big Ten, all games would be played on neutral sites, and the language of the "four best teams" rather than conference champions was the directive for the committee choosing the semifinals, a move that Slive correctly figured would benefit the SEC more than any other conference.
A lot of people would say that Delany lost that debate, but that's the great thing about both Mike Slive and the cultural exchange that is college sports. Even though Silve was acting purely in the interests of his own conference, the fruits of his labor was that on January 12th, 2015, the Ohio State Buckeyes, a team that beat SEC blue blood Alabama the game before and which was coached by a man who established his bonafides at an SEC school, won the first ever College Football Playoff final.
That's pretty cool. Mike Slive made the SEC into a rival for Ohio State, Big Ten, and Jim Delany, but no one can say that both conferences didn't benefit in so many different ways from the fight.
