Roy Kramer, a former commissioner of the Southeastern Conference who turned it into a lucrative national power and, from that perch, transformed college football more broadly, helping to devise the Bowl Championship Series, a much-debated system for determining the national champion that endured for 16 years, died on Dec. 4 in Maryville, Tenn. He was 96.
His son, Steve, confirmed the death, in a hospital. Mr. Kramer lived nearby in Vonore, in eastern Tennessee.
Mr. Kramer, a championship-winning football coach who became college athletic director at Vanderbilt, was named commissioner of the SEC in 1990. During his 12 years at the helm, he engineered spectacular growth in revenue for the conference, derived from television rights — including a $1 billion blockbuster deal with CBS — bowl games and other income sources.
In 1990, the conference shared $16 million with its schools; when Mr. Kramer retired in 2002, the figure had sextupled.
“By any standard,” Mike Tranghese, a former Big East Conference commissioner, told The Associated Press in 2002, “Roy’s influence has been mind-boggling.”
In 1998, Mr. Kramer led a group of conference commissioners in search of a new way to crown a national football champion. In his version, the B.C.S., the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the country emerged from a point system that averaged the rankings in media and coaches’ polls and three computer rankings while also weighing team losses and strength of opposing teams.
Charles Bloom, a former associate commissioner of the SEC, said in an interview that he and Mr. Kramer had devised the formula and that before winning the approval of conference commissioners, they used it to demonstrate how the system would have worked over the previous 10 years.
“It’s clear-cut, objective and factual,” Mr. Kramer, who held the title of bowl series coordinator, said when the system was unveiled in 1998. Responding to questions about its complexity, he said that it was no more complicated than “figuring out 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 a four-team playoff system replaced it. “It probably lasted longer than I thought it would to start with,” Mr. Kramer told The Birmingham News in 2013. “It was a shot in the dark.”
To his great satisfaction, SEC teams won nine of those 16 bowl championships.
Roy Foster Kramer was born in Maryville on Oct. 30, 1929. His father, Russell, was a lawyer, and his mother, Alice (Gray) Kramer, managed the home. Roy attended Maryville College, where he was an offensive lineman on the football team and a wrestler. His education was interrupted by Army service during the Korean War, and he was stationed in West Germany.
When he returned from active duty, he received a bachelor’s degree in physical education from Maryville in 1953 and a master’s in education from the University of Michigan the next year.
His coaching career began in Michigan high schools, and his teams won three state championships before he joined Central Michigan University’s football team in 1965 as an assistant coach. In 1966, he published “The Complete Book of the I Formation,” about a well-known offensive scheme. The book “sold enough copies to buy a used station wagon,” he said.
He was named Central Michigan’s head coach in 1967. Over 11 seasons, the Chippewas compiled an 83-32-2 record, winning the Division II national championship in 1974. He was named the Division II national coach of the year in 1974 and elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 2023.
Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, hired him as athletic director in 1978. There, he was credited with upgrading its sports facilities, including its football stadium; initiating a steroid-testing system; and merging the women’s and men’s athletics departments.
While at Vanderbilt, he was a member of a committee of college officials that negotiated a seven-year, $1 billion contract in 1989 for CBS to carry the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament from 1991 to 1997.
“He was part of several N.C.A.A. basketball negotiations with CBS,” Len DeLuca, a former vice president of CBS Sports, said in an interview, “and you’d see him deep in thought, and you wondered if he was listening. Then he’d hit with you a smart financial future question that revealed that he was not only listening, but he was a couple of steps ahead of you.”
Mr. Kramer, expanded the SEC to 12 teams — it now has 16 — by adding the University of Arkansas and the University of South Carolina. That let him trigger a little-known N.C.A.A. clause that allowed conferences with 12 or more members to split into two six-team divisions and hold a championship game.
“We didn’t have a clue that there was expansion on the horizon until Kramer came in the AD room and says, ‘What do y’all think about having a championship football game, and going into divisions?,’” Larry Templeton, a former athletic director at Mississippi State University, told the N.C.A.A.’s website in 2020.
Their surprise was genuine. There were no postseason championship games in what is now the N.C.A.A. Division I Football Bowl Subdivision until Alabama beat Florida, 28-21, in the 1992 SEC title game. That contest served as a model for many other conferences, who initiated their own title games over the next years.
Mr. Kramer’s changes made the SEC a more valuable television property. He recognized early in his tenure that the SEC should have its own television deal. In 1990, Notre Dame defected to NBC Sports soon after the College Football Association negotiated a new deal with ABC Sports that gave it the broadcast rights to most major conferences, including the SEC.
“Roy called me up and said, ‘DeLuca, do you want to talk to our conference?’” Mr. DeLuca recalled. “It was just a tease, but three years later, we lost the N.F.L., and we had an appetite for college football.”
In 1994, CBS Sports acquired the conference’s football broadcast rights for $100 million over five years, starting in 1996, plus the rights to men’s and women’s basketball games.
CBS guaranteed the SEC a regular Saturday time slot for Alabama, Florida, Auburn, Louisiana State University and its other schools during the regular season and broader national exposure than it had gotten in the C.F.A. deal.
ABC held onto the conference’s championship game for a few more years until CBS acquired it in a stand-alone deal in 2001.
“There were a lot of reasons why it wouldn’t work, and some of them actually made sense,” Mr. Kramer told The Atlanta Constitution in 2001, referring to the concept of a conference championship game. “But there was one overriding reason why it would work: We had a great product to sell.”
Paul Finebaum, the ESPN commentator and former sports columnist, described Mr. Kramer in a telephone interview as “one of the most influential people in college football history” who made many good decisions. But he also recalled that under Mr. Kramer’s watch, Alabama and Kentucky were placed under probation by the N.C.A.A. for recruiting and academic violations.
When the news broke about the schools’ violations in 2001, Mr. Finebaum told his radio show audience, “Kramer reminds me of the piano player at the local brothel. He’s a good and decent fellow. But, of course, when his friends go up and down the stairs at the brothel, he conveniently turns his head so he has no official knowledge of their presence.”
Within minutes, Mr. Kramer’s wife, Sara Jo, called the show “ripping me into shreds like a Great White Shark attacking a school of fish at dinner time,” Mr. Finebaum wrote in The Mobile Register.
Sara Jo (Emert) Kramer, Mr. Kramer’s wife of 62 years, 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. .
Mr. Kramer died two days before Georgia defeated Alabama, 28-7, for the SEC championship. There was a moment of silence for him before the game.
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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