Sixteen and Counting: The National Championships of Alabama Football

By Bill Battle, Eryk Anders, Javier Arenas and 18 more

Dramatic accounts of every University of Alabama National Championship football season recounted by noted sports writers, players, and Alabamians.

Dating back to 1925, when Wallace Wade coached the Crimson Tide to an undefeated season and earned a spot in the Rose Bowl, the driving goal of every University of Alabama football season has been a national championship. A winning team surfaced that very next year, when Hoyt “Wu” Winslett’s squad sealed the national championship at the Rose Bowl for a second time. Winning seasons and bowl games culminating in the coveted crown followed again in 1930, 1934, 1941, 1961, 1964, 1965, 1973, 1978, 1979, 1992, 2009, 2011, 2012, and 2015—more championships than any other college team in the nation.

Sixteen and Counting features a chapter highlighting each of these championship seasons and collects the legendary stories of many of the outstanding coaches and players on the University of Alabama’s championship teams. College football legends such as Wallace Wade, Wu Winslett, Johnny Mack Brown, Pooley Herbert, Frank Thomas, Dixie Howell, Don Hutson, Jimmy Nelson, Holt Rast, Pat Trammel, Sam Bailey, Lee Roy Jordan, Harry Gilmer, Bill Lee, Ken Stabler, Joe Namath, Gary Rutledge, Randy Billingsley, Barry Krauss, Clem Gryska, Gene Stallings, Paul “Bear” Bryant, and, of course, Nick Saban all make prominent appearances.

A seventeenth chapter is included that looks at the uncrowned teams commonly referred to as “the other five,” who were considered national champions by at least one national ranking service at the end of the season. Every glorious milestone and high point in Alabama football history is included here: “Mama called,” the wishbone formation, “The Goal Line Stand,” the Million Dollar Band, the coaching tower, the Davis kicking dynasty, the Notre Dame box, Coach of the Year, Team of the Decade, and two Heisman trophy winners.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Aug 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9780817391645

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Introduction

KENNETH GADDY

To understand the roots of Alabama football you need to only look to one person, William Gray Little. As a Sumter County boy exposed to foot ball during his boarding school days in Massachusetts he knew the sport would be a hit back home. Little became the father of Alabama football in 1892 as he introduced to campus the game that became the source of so much glory and acclaim. He envisioned the rough and tumble sport finding a home in the Deep South and the rest, as they say, is history.

The next milestone comes from a non-traditional source, not a coach or an athlete-but from a member of academia. The University of Alabama president George Mike Denny saw the new game as a recruiting tool not only to bring players to campus but students as well. His vision to make the Capstone a national household name is still paying dividends nearly a century later. Denny chose a battle-hardened veteran to put his plan into action. Wallace Wade had experience not only in the gridiron wars but also in real life warfare as a field artillery commander in World War I. (He later returned to this position in World War II.) Wade’s field general demeanor became one of the standards by which all other coaches at Alabama are judged.

Lingering over the entire south in the 1920s were the physical and emotional scars of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Two landmark events helped heal a portion of the wounds. In the fall of 1922 Xen Scott led the team into the North to take on the University of Pennsylvania. That victory over the Quakers started a ripple that his successor, Wallace Wade, rode to greater glory three seasons later in the 1925 Rose Bowl.

On the firm foundation built by Little, Denny, Wade, and so many others, the coaching mantle was passed to Frank Coach Tommy Thomas in 1931. Coach Thomas not only built on the success of Wade but also did something special in response to an unusual turn of history. In 1943 The University of Alabama did not field a team. The call to duty in Europe and in the Pacific depleted the male student population on campus. He was able to reestablish the football program the next year using returning GIs and 4F players nicknamed the War Babies. Another event in Thomas’ tenure ripples through time to this day. Paul Bryant was recruited to play football for Alabama.

Paul Bryant took the reigns of the Tide at low ebb. He is famously quoted as saying Mama called. The reason he returned to his alma mater has become a part of the tradition that is still embraced by the fans. Part of being called for a fan is being in the stands or by the radio when the Tide takes the field. Bryant concentrated on players, not plays. He later said he wanted to surround himself with people to whom football was important. That meant everyone from players to coaches to ticket takers. Bryant had a work ethic born in the Depression days in rural Arkansas. The hard work he demanded of his players soon bore the fruit our authors will illustrate.

One of Bryant’s students, Gene Stallings, learned as a player and an assistant. Stallings quoted Sir Isaac Newton on the day he was announced as the twenty-second coach at Alabama, If I can see farther than others it is because I am standing on the shoulders of giants. He had the advantage of the giants of Alabama football we recorded above and scores more.

Since our first edition of this book, Twelve and Counting, Coach Nick Saban has again thrust The University of Alabama to the top of the football world winning four more national titles with power-running games and dominating defenses. Mark Ingram and Derrick Henry earned Heisman trophies, adding new pages to the history books. Mal Moore’s trip to Miami to recruit Saban may go down as one of the biggest milestones in Crimson Tide lore.

There have been over twenty-five hundred players in the history of Alabama football. Each one has writ their name in Crimson flame as the Bama fight song tells. From William Little to today’s team they have given us, the fans, their all. The players are like fraternity brothers, even the ones who did not play together, no matter the number of decades that separate them. Wearing the crimson jersey is one of the highest badges of honor issued in the state.

From those attending the first game in 1892 (the crowd at the train station to meet the team returning from Pennsylvania), to the 102,000 that were packing Bryant-Denny Stadium, the fans have embraced the teams, the coaches, and the players. In the early days, newspapers and word of mouth were the only ways to follow the team. Later the ticker-tape parties in the larger cities in the state transformed into radio parties throughout the south. The growth of radio expanded the numbers and reach of the crimson nation. Today the Internet expands that reach worldwide. Fans have told us of walking through an airport and hearing Roll Tide and then remembering they are wearing a Bama shirt. Game days are a sea of crimson and white. The Bryant Museum has a database of over five hundred children named for Coach Bryant and has an annual Bryant namesake reunion.

The staff of the Paul W. Bryant Museum makes coming to work a pleasure. Their imprint is present throughout this book. Most of the writers benefited from their knowledge and the resources of the museum in their research. I also want to thank their families and mine for putting up with our long hours and even longer stories from the museum.

The staff of The University of Alabama Press have been great partners in this venture. Their hard work should not be overlooked.

So many people like Jeff Coleman, Hank Crisp, and Merrill Collins have contributed to the Alabama football legacy on and off the field. It seems inadequate to say a simple thank you, but I hope they know this attempt is heartfelt.

Finally, I would like to thank our distinguished lists of authors. Each one readily accepted the challenge to convey to you the story of a national championship year in a very limited number of words. We intentionally chose a different author for each championship season to give a unique voice to their accomplishments. Each championship team builds on the success of the teams before them, which led us to the Sixteen and Counting title.

On to the professional writers . . .

CHAPTER ONE

1925

ANDREW DOYLE

History is replete with legends that become less impressive under close scrutiny, and the sporting world is no exception. But it is difficult to overstate the achievements of Wallace Wade’s 1925 Alabama team. Led by quarterback and defensive stalwart Pooley Hubert and sparked by the game-breaking ability of halfback Johnny Mack Brown, it dominated Southern Conference competition to win its second consecutive conference championship. A Rose Bowl invitation soon followed, but it came under inauspicious circumstances: Alabama was a fallback choice only after several more heralded schools had turned down offers. Entering the game as a lightly regarded underdog and quickly falling behind by two touchdowns, the Tide faced a bitter finale to a brilliant season. But a miraculous come-from-behind victory shocked the so-called experts, sealed the national championship, and vaulted Alabama to football prominence.

This game rocked the football world—southern teams simply did not do things like this. During its early years southern football had been appallingly bad. American football evolved during the 1870s and 1880s at elite northeastern universities, especially Yale. But, plagued by two generations of endemic poverty following the Civil War and wary of Yankee cultural innovations, southerners showed no interest in football until a new generation began the slow process of integrating the South into the nation’s economic and cultural mainstream. The football fad spread among southern colleges between the late 1880s and mid-1890s, but enthusiasm hardly guarantees success. Virginia boldly took the South’s best team northward in 1889, but it limped home after losing 72–0 to Penn and 115–0 to Princeton.

Southerners narrowed the sectional gap over the next three decades, but progress was excruciatingly slow. Southern states spent little on public education, and most, including Alabama, spent even less than they could afford. Virginia and Vanderbilt generally ranked as the best of the southern schools prior to World War I, and Sewanee was usually close behind. The Ivy Leaguers who invented football envisioned it as a pastime for the elite, and the prep schools from which Virginia, Vandy, and Sewanee recruited virtually all of their students generally had strong football programs. (Public high schools were few in number, their football was usually second-rate, and the vast majority of southern boys worked full-time by age fifteen, anyway.) Virginia defeated mighty Yale in 1915, and Vandy tied them in 1910. But these were the best southern performances against the nation’s leading teams prior to World War I. Alabama always lagged among the southern also-rans and did not tempt fate by venturing out of the region.

Bolstered by growing enrollments, greater revenues, and more public high schools from which to recruit, the public universities in the Deep South rose to prominence just before World War I. Georgia Tech was dominant in 1916 and 1917, and head coach John Heisman and his cheerleaders in the southern newspapers hailed the latter team as the first southern national champion. This claim is dubious at best. America entered World War I in March 1917, and the famed sports columnist Grantland Rice of the New York Herald-Tribune estimated that three-fourths of the nation’s best football players had joined the armed services. Unlike the vast majority of their fellow coaches, Heisman and Pitt’s Pop Warner persuaded their players to forego military service, and each cruised unbeaten through hapless competition. No poll system yet existed, but a majority of sportswriters nationwide chose Pitt as the best of an abysmally weak field. (Each team’s roster had changed significantly, but Pitt defeated Tech in 1918, 1919, and 1920.)

Southern football improved dramatically during the early 1920s. While its overall quality remained well below that of the rest of the nation, the better southern teams occasionally won an inter-sectional game. Alabama pulled off one of these rare upsets with a shocking 9–7 victory over Penn in 1922. But that victory was a bright spot amid the usual mediocrity. Alabama promptly lost to Kentucky and finished with a 6–3–1 record. Head coach Xen Scott died after the season, and for the sixteenth time in its thirty-year football history, Alabama officials cast about for a new coach.

This time, they hit the jackpot. Thirty-one-year-old Wallace Wade was a Tennessee native who had learned big-time football at Brown University, playing on the team that won the first Rose Bowl in 1916. As an assistant at Vanderbilt in 1921 and 1922, he oversaw the day-to-day management of the team while head coach Dan McGugin maintained a Nashville law practice. Part-time coaches were a throwback to an earlier era, but Wade was totally committed to his profession. His skill and dedication temporarily reversed Vanderbilt’s decline, and it posted its last undefeated seasons while he worked there.

As he did with most issues facing the school, Alabama president George Denny made the final decision to hire Wade. Upon assuming office in 1914, Denny personally oversaw the football program. Financial support for athletes was the linchpin of any successful program, since outmoded rules originally conceived in Victorian England banned athletic scholarships. So like all but a handful of schools, Alabama provided under-the-table funding to cover tuition and living expenses. But unlike most of his peers, Denny personally supervised the process. And his micromanagement included attendance at many practices, at which he stood on the sideline puffing casually on his pipe. Friction quickly developed between Denny and the equally strong-willed Wade, and it was a factor in the latter’s departure in 1931. But for the moment, the new coach focused on building his