I believe Dodd overreacted to recruiting number issues. He always had a huge number of players - players redshirting, playing freshman football, etc. some really great Atlanta area players signed with Tech only to be buried on depth charts when I was a kid. My Dad had coached David Seawell at Roosevelt, Class of ‘60, QB. He spent five years at Tech and only played freshman ball and held for extra points. Dodd felt the large numbers helped him be prepared for academic attrition. Also, we can only speculate how much he was trying to intuit how integration would change the football landscape of the South. But, he thought he was right and that we could be a Southern Notre Dame as an independent.
He was very wrong, in hindsight. The NCAA crackdown on scholarship numbers for all schools, the successful navigation of integrating Southern teams, the explosion of television that catered to conferences - all of these forces hurt the program. Atlanta becoming a pro sports city was a factor.
Many say that had we stayed we would have been a Vandy in SEC football. I disagree. As an SEC member we outperformed Tulane, Vandy, Miss State and Kentucky. I do not believe that would have changed. I think we could have had our times where we would have competed well against Tennessee, Ole Miss, Florida and Auburn. We would have been fine against newcomers like South Carolina and Arkansas. Money, coaching, exposure, recruiting - it would all have been better if we had stayed in the SEC.