BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- Roy Kramer retired as Southeastern Conference commissioner Tuesday, ending a career in which he created the Bowl Championship Series and was one of the most powerful officials in college sports.

Florida AD not interested

Florida athletic director Jeremy Foley will not seek the job of Southeastern Conference commissioner after being widely considered a top candidate to succeed Roy Kramer. Foley has worked at Florida for 25 years and said Tuesday this would be an inopportune time to leave. "It's flattering, but I will not be a candidate for this job," Foley said in Birmingham, Ala., where Kramer announced his retirement and will step down by the end of the school year. "I have a passion for the University of Florida." -- Associated Press

The 72-year-old Kramer will remain commissioner until a successor is chosen. No timetable was given for selecting a new commissioner.

Kramer has overseen SEC sports for 12 years, a period in which the conference became the most financially successful in the nation. The SEC took in $95 million in revenues in 2000.

But he leaves at a time when the conference has two of its most prominent schools -- Alabama and Kentucky -- on NCAA probation.

"This conference was a great conference before I ever got here," Kramer said at a news conference. "This conference will be a great conference after Roy Kramer is gone. It has been a great ride over those 12 years."

Asked why he's retiring, Kramer said: "It's time to move on."

Former Georgia president Charles Knapp will lead the search for a new commissioner. A committee of SEC presidents will oversee the search.

SEC president Robert Khayat, chancellor of Mississippi, called the end of Kramer's tenure "one of the historical moments in the conference. ... The only word that really fits this is bittersweet."

Since becoming SEC commissioner in 1990, Kramer persuaded the four major college football bowls to agree to a rotating national championship game. He also worked out lucrative TV deals for the SEC and instituted an annual conference championship game, but league schools also ran into repeated problems with the NCAA.

The BCS -- using a complex formula to place teams in the Sugar, Fiesta, Orange and Rose bowls -- may be considered Kramer's most notable and controversial endeavor. Kramer became head of the BCS committee in 1995.

While the new system unified the major national conferences and set up a national championship game, it also has created dispute over who belongs in that game almost every year. The BCS combines the AP and coaches' polls, strength of schedule, computer rankings and number of losses, to come up with the top two teams to play for the BCS title.

He reveled in the fact that the disputed system created debate and the entire bowl system remained intact, allowing the lesser bowl games and dozens of schools to take part in the postseason and make money.

The system also helped up to eight schools from the SEC play in bowls in a single postseason.

Kramer was the first commissioner to conceive of a conference title game, a moneymaking venture that the SEC began in 1992 and which has netted conference schools millions of dollars.

Kramer negotiated multimillion-dollar TV deals, and last spring the 12 teams split $78.1 million in profits. In 1990, the total was $16.3 million.

Within seven months of taking over the SEC, he welcomed Arkansas and South Carolina as members. It took less than two years before the first football championship game was played in the expanded conference.

Two SEC recently had two schools hit with NCAA sanctions. Alabama and Kentucky were disciplined on consecutive days for football violations.

Also, member schools have been caught with major violations 15 times since the league announced its expansion to 12 universities in 1990, the most of any big-time conference in that period. Each SEC member has been accused of a major rules infraction at least once since 1990.

"No one's more concerned about it than I am," Kramer said last month. "But I've been in this business a long time, and I'm far more positive about where we are today than I was 15 or 20 years ago. Does that mean we still don't have problems? No, we do."

Kramer was a two-time chairman of the NCAA men's tournament selection committee and then went into administration. He was Vanderbilt's athletic director from 1978-90.