re: Alabama seniors

While I don't know the exact answer, I can rough it in some.

Back then the conference didn't schedule a set number of games like we do now, where everyone plays the same number of foes from a slate of rotating conference teams. Schools were left to schedule their games as they saw fit, so sometimes teams would play more SEC games than another team did. If you look at the old SEC champs and see the conference records between them and the 2nd and third place teams, you will sometimes see that the champion was determined because they played an extra SEC game.

This doesn't directly explain why their is such a gap in the years that Bama and UK played...but it shows that their was a lot of flexibility in how the games were scheduled. Why they chose not to play, I have no idea.