ATLANTA — Bobby Dodd has been described as a principled, charismatic leader who had earned the trust of the people at Georgia Tech. That included his players, who sat before him in the football team meeting room on a Friday afternoon as Dodd told them about making what might have been the worst decision of his career.

Few people realized that at the time. Fewer people might have understood the reason. Dodd tried to explain it to his players: The SEC had a rule that allowed schools to recruit an excess number of players and then run off the ones they didn’t want to keep. Georgia Tech refused to do that.

“We can’t compete in a league where this is being done,” Dodd told his team, as recalled by Bill Curry, then a junior offensive lineman.

And so Georgia Tech, a charter member of the SEC in 1933, pulled out Jan. 24, 1964. The dramatic move, which followed a failed effort to change SEC rules, sent Georgia Tech on a long, often rocky, conference affiliation journey that might not be complete.

An effort to get back into the SEC, only to be turned away. An era of independence. Finding a home in the ACC. A dalliance with the Big Ten, which had more substance to it than maybe believed. And now the uncertain future of the ACC, as Georgia Tech also pushes to return to national prominence.

“It’s a topic that is incredibly complicated. It covers 60 years,” said Wes Durham, who was the school’s radio voice from 1995 to 2013. “It’s a fascinating history when you think about it. It really is. And they’ve had some personalities there that really helped and made it a better place. And they had people who probably thought they could re-spark the storybook (history of Georgia Tech). Then the landscape changed under their feet.”

Leaving the SEC

The Yellow Jackets — or Engineers, as they commonly were called in newspaper stories at the time — had a storied history in the SEC. They won five football conference titles, the last one coming in 1952 when they also won the national title.

Dodd, a quarterback and three-sport star at Tennessee, arrived at Georgia Tech in 1931 as an assistant coach. He became the head coach in 1945, then the athletic director four years later and for decades was Georgia Tech.

“Bobby Dodd had this great personality, he was an excellent speaker, he felt so at ease in front of a microphone. He was a country boy from Tennessee but spent his whole career in Atlanta,” said Mitch Ginn, a Georgia Tech alum born in 1960. “But he made the biggest mistake ever when he gambled the whole program on a rule that, to me, he could have just lived with and tried to live within the system.”

That was the SEC’s “140 rule,” which limited the number of scholarships each school could offer per year, including a cap of 45 football and men’s basketball scholarships. Many coaches got around it by cutting players they didn’t want anymore. Dodd refused to do that.

“There are schools that are signing 60 student-athletes and then running half of them off every year. And we don’t do that,” Dodd told his players at that 1964 meeting, Curry said. “If we sign you, we’re going to keep you. If you’re not a good football player, then that’s my fault, not your fault, because I invited you here.”

There were other issues with the SEC. Georgia Tech and Alabama — fans and head coaches — engaged in a public feud after a 1961 game when Georgia Tech’s Chick Graning was hit by Alabama’s Darwin Holt on what appeared to be a dirty play. The SEC also shared bowl and television revenue (very little at the time), and Georgia Tech might have preferred to go independent and keep its own for itself. Later events showed the fallacy of that, so it really, at least publicly, did come down to the “140 rule” and the bigger picture it created: Georgia Tech doing things right and the SEC not going along.

Dodd wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Hugh Kirkman, Class of 1927, wrote Bob Wallace of the Georgia Tech alumni association on Oct. 3, 1963: “I am in complete agreement with you that Tech would be better off as an independent. I think that the conference furnishes nothing to Tech, quite the contrary is the case. I am for anything that will increase the distance between Tech and everything represented by the likes of Paul Bryant.”

Dodd lobbied his peers and SEC presidents to get the rule changed. But he failed in a dramatic series of days chronicled by Ginn in his 2011 article for the school’s alumni magazine: “The day Tech sports changed forever.”

Georgia Tech president Edwin D. Harrison delivered the news to the dozen other SEC presidents and chancellors in a two-minute speech. In a news conference afterward, he said the school would continue to play “our traditional rivals, Tennessee, Auburn and Georgia.” Asked whether Tech would return if the SEC changed the rule, he said, “I’d hate to go through this again.”

The SEC did change the rule nine years later.

“It’s just something he decided to take on and do. And everybody just went along and went with it,” Ginn said. “He had backed himself into a corner. So he and the president pulled out of the conference. The gamble didn’t pay off.”

Trying to return to SEC

For a few years, independence suited Georgia Tech. It still played Georgia and the other traditional rivals and added fellow independent Notre Dame: The final game in the movie “Rudy” is against Georgia Tech.

There were plenty of other independents in those days: Pittsburgh’s chancellor, Edwin Litchfield, wrote Harrison in September 1963, advising on what their experience was like and suggesting a partnership with like-minded independents Syracuse, West Virginia and Penn State. They could exchange confidential information on every athlete receiving aid, allowing them to essentially be a check on each other if they were taking shortcuts. The letter, found in Harrison’s papers at the Georgia Tech archives, concluded: “Perhaps the time may come when you would care to discuss a possible relationship between our institutions.”

(It only took 48 years for Georgia Tech, Pittsburgh and Syracuse to come together.)

During the first three years of independence, Georgia Tech went 7-3, 7-3-1 and then 9-2-1, making the Orange Bowl in Dodd’s final game as coach. He turned the program over to assistant Bud Carson, but the team endured three consecutive losing seasons, and Dodd fired Carson after five years. Attendance slipped, and by the early 1970s, the athletic department began running deficits.

Dodd wanted back in the SEC.

“We need the conference and the conference needs us,” Dodd said in an interview with the UPI. He also estimated that 90 percent of Tech alumni wanted back in the SEC.

There was support from an unexpected source: Bryant, who said he “hoped and prayed Tech would get back in before I got out of coaching.” Florida athletic director Ray Graves was also supportive: “Tech belongs in the SEC and never should have left in the first place.”

But support elsewhere was lukewarm. The SEC was at 10 schools — Tulane left two years after Georgia Tech — and the league wasn’t crazy about other expansion candidates. Florida State long wanted in the league — seeking to replace Georgia Tech in 1964 — and was still available, but this was pre-Bobby Bowden, so the program wasn’t that desirable. Memphis State also badly wanted in.

Georgia athletic director Joel Eaves, speaking in November 1973 at the Atlanta Touchdown Club, presented it as a two-or-none proposal: “It will probably come down to whether or not they consider it best to expand the conference to more than the 10 teams or not. … There is talk of bringing in two instead of just Tech, and there has been discussion of splitting the conference into North and South or East and West divisions of six each if two new schools are admitted.”

The SEC had a meeting scheduled in Birmingham for Dec. 2-3. Memphis State turned out in full force with its president, athletic director, football coach and six members of the Memphis Chamber of Commerce. The Georgia Tech delegation, however, was zero.

“Tech knew it had no chance,” a source told Jim Hunter of the Atlanta Journal. Seven votes were needed in favor, and an informal vote taken days before said Tech would be “lucky to get the approval of even sister school Georgia.”

Dodd took it well: “I’m disappointed, naturally. But I’m not surprised. I don’t blame the SEC for not even voting on expansion. The conference is too big already.”

Privately, Dodd might have had a more direct feeling. Curry, in 1975, ran into Bryant, who asked Curry to tell his old coach he still wanted to sponsor Georgia Tech’s re-entry into the SEC. Curry carried the message home to Dodd, who shook his head.

“We’ll never get back in the SEC because some of the schools hate us too much,” Dodd said.