Two weeks from tonight, Georgia Tech and Tennessee will collide on a football field for the first time in 30 seasons.
It wasn’t always this way. The Yellow Jackets and Volunteers competed annually as Southeastern Conference members from 1954 to 1963, and they routinely met for a generation even after Georgia Tech announced its departure from the SEC in January 1964.
“When I played for the legendary Bobby Dodd, our biggest game of the year at Georgia Tech was not the University of Georgia,” former Yellow Jackets center and head coach Bill Curry said. “Our biggest game was the Vols, and you could just feel that from him. It was a very big game, and it was a very big rivalry.”
Georgia Tech was an independent after leaving the SEC until 1983, when the Yellow Jackets started competing in the Atlantic Coast Conference. They faced Alabama, Auburn, Georgia and Tennessee out of conference when they joined the ACC, but the rivalry with Alabama ended after the 1984 matchup, and the annual games with Auburn and Tennessee ended after the 1987 season.
“I do hate to see those things end,” said Curry, who was a recent guest of “Press Row” on Chattanooga’s ESPN 105.1 FM, “but when you move into a different league, you have to be judicious with who you play out of your league, and I think that’s the reason there was a change.”