Teammates for Life: The Inspiring Story of Auburn University’s Unbelievable, Unforgettable and Utterly Amazin’ 1972 Football Team, Then and Now

By Jeff Miller and David Housel

Anyone who cheers for the underdog will be enthralled by the story of Auburn’s 1972 football team.

The Tigers were predicted to drop into the bottom half of the Southeastern Conference standings after losing quarterback Pat Sullivan, who won the 1971 Heisman Trophy, and All-American receiver Terry Beasley. Going into their opening game, they had only five offensive plays.

Auburn proved its critics wrong all year long, capping an unbelievable season with a jaw-dropping upset of Alabama, returning two blocked punts for touchdowns in the game’s closing minutes. Instead of finishing in sixth place in the SEC, the team finished fifth—in the country!

The Amazin’s, as they were nicknamed, won as a result of the bonds they formed during grueling winter workouts and August two-a-day practices under the unforgiving Alabama sun. Fifty years later, the Amazin’s still find strength in each other, facing new challenges as teammates for life.

If you cherish Auburn football, great rivalries, and want to learn how to apply lessons from the gridiron to everyday life, then you’ll love this inspiring story of the university’s most unforgettable team—then and now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Nov 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665729024

Jeff Miller

Jeff Miller is an Auburn University graduate who has written about college football for publications in Alabama, Florida and Texas. His work has also been published by ESPN.com, and he served as an editor for The Athletic and CBSSports.com. Among his previous seven books are an oral history of the zany American Football League of the 1960s (“Going Long”), the little-known tale of racial integration of major college football in Texas (“Game Changers”) and an inside look at the eight West Point seniors from the winless 2003 football team who then went off to war (“Football Fields and Battlefields”).

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Copyright © 2022 Jeff Miller.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All Rights Reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2900-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2901-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2902-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022915963

Archway Publishing rev. date: 05/25/2023

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1 I’d rather beat the cow college.

Chapter 2 They’re the greatest bunch I’ve had here at Auburn.

Chapter 3 This is my Heisman Trophy man!

Chapter 4 Put the bottom in the bucket.

Chapter 5 Step off here where I can run you over.

Chapter 6 I can’t imagine doing it over again.

Chapter 7 Why the hell are you out here?

Chapter 8 Don’t bury us yet.

Chapter 9 We still have a long way to go.

Chapter 10 Those Amazing Auburns.

Chapter 11 You will never play on a team this good again.

Chapter 12 I’ll never forget this group of people.

Chapter 13 The kicking game certainly looms large.

Chapter 14 We’ll beat the … duh-duh … out of Alabama.

Chapter 15 They think they’ve got the game won.

Chapter 16 It is blocked! It is blocked!

Chapter 17 I’m putting this team at the top of the list.

Chapter 18 Damn good coach! Damn good coach!

Chapter 19 This was a team that achieved the impossible dream.

Chapter 20 Auburn football will never be the same.

Chapter 21 Are we OK about the FSU game?

Chapter 22 I’m thankful I know every one of ya.

Reflections

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

About the Author

FOREWORD

A t the end of World War II, after the atomic bombs had fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after peace had been restored, General Douglas MacArthur said, It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh …

It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh …

This book is about the spirit and the effect the spirit can have on the flesh, in this case the accomplishments of the flesh – when the spirit encourages and enables the flesh to do and to accomplish more than it or anyone thought possible.

That it happened at Auburn in the year 1972 is incidental. It is a story about the power of the human spirit. It is more than an Auburn story; it is a human story, one that could happen anywhere people come together and commit themselves to one another and to accomplishing goals greater than anyone, perhaps even themselves, thought they could do.

My Auburn friends, especially the ones who played on this team, the ones this story is about, might disagree. Some have, vehemently. But truth is truth, and the truth is this story, this story of the triumph of the human spirit, is about much more than Auburn. It’s more than an Auburn story. At its base, it is a story about men coming together to meet challenges and overcome the odds. It is a story about the human spirit, in this case the Auburn Spirit.

As the coach of the 1972 Tigers – the Amazin’s – Ralph Shug Jordan once said, College football wouldn’t be worth the time, effort and money put into it if it was just about the coaches and players. The real value of college football comes in the lessons that can be learned by those who play and by those who watch it and the values they carry forward into their own lives.

A writer, Jerry Bryan of The Birmingham News, once put it this way: "Games like these (teams like these) come along only once in a long while. A team and its coach prove themselves great on the inside, where the heart is. The public watches, understands and is proud."

Even if you are not an Auburn fan, even if you abhor Auburn, there is much to learn from the 1972 Auburn Tigers.

Much to learn.

This team relied on the Spirit, each other and not much else.

They weren’t supposed to be very good. They weren’t supposed to be good at all.

As Ed Shearer, highly respected Associated Press sports editor for the Southeast, wrote in his preseason story, The biggest change in the Southeastern Conference power structure this year will be the demise of Auburn.

The demise of Auburn.

The men who would make up the 1972 team put those things in their hearts and pondered them.

Pondered them and made up their minds to do something about it.

Each player has a story or an experience that exemplifies the heart, will, stamina, toughness and plain ol’ guts – the true grit – that made their dreams come true. Their stories are told within the pages of this book.

But one stands out. I will try to be brief.

Fraternal twins Bob and Bill Newton played football for Fayette County High School in Fayette, Alabama. Both were good football players, but Bob was considered to be the better college prospect.

Saying years later it was the hardest thing he ever had to do in coaching, Auburn assistant Sam Mitchell sat with their widowed mother and told them he had one scholarship, not two. We can give Bob a scholarship, but we don’t have one for Bill, he said, finally unable to hold back the tears that flowed freely. Mitchell was not the only one crying.

Bill looked up and said, That’s alright. I’ll go to Auburn, anyway, and I’ll earn a scholarship.

Earn it. Earn a scholarship.

The first obstacle had been overcome.

Those tears of sadness turned to tears of joy and ecstasy several years later when Bill, having earned that scholarship and become a starter on the ’72 team, made two of the three biggest plays in Auburn history. Made them minutes apart in the same game.

But his story, as this team’s story, is not so much about individual plays as it is (and was) about the gumption, commitment and resolve that enabled him to make those plays and enabled this team to accomplish things nobody, no one, thought it could do.

Bill Newton’s story is but one of many such stories that made the Amazin’s so amazing. Amazing stories, from amazing players on an Amazin’ team, a team we can learn from even now, 50 years later.

As was written a long time ago about another team at another place in another time: They believed in themselves, their destiny they knew, and they had the stuff to make their dreams come true.

The lesson is clear. Then, now, and far into the future: If they can do it, we can do it. And so can you.

There is much to be learned here, much to inspire, us to be more than we think we can be. And it matters not which team or teams we support. This is more than an Auburn story; this is a story about the triumph of the human spirit.

A word about the author, Jeff Miller. In the interest of full disclosure, he was a student of mine back in the ’70s, when he was a young man, and I thought I had something to offer as a journalism instructor.

I’ve watched him grow as a writer, as a husband and as a father. As a man. He knows about the human spirit, he’s felt the spirit move, and he knows how to tell a story. A good story. Especially this one.

So, sit back, relax and enjoy.

As unbelievable as this story might seem, there is no need for a "Once upon a time…" at its start.

This one really happened, a long time ago in the little town of Auburn, Alabama.

And we can all be better because it did.

David Housel, March 2022

INTRODUCTION

I was traveling incognito. Sort of.

The boarding call was made for a flight out of D/FW International Airport to Birmingham on the afternoon of December 7, 2019. Some Southeastern Conference football context should help identify the timeframe – that night in Atlanta, Joe Burrow and LSU beat Georgia on the way to winning the national championship.

I’m an Auburn graduate (December 1976) but was wearing no Tigers attire. In line during boarding, I stood directly behind a man and a woman both dressed in Alabama Crimson Tide garb. Seven days earlier, Auburn pulled off a stunning 48-45 upset of Bama that squashed Alabama’s chances of qualifying for the four-team College Football Playoff as a second team from the SEC. The game contained enough plot twists that The Athletic website concluded Tarantino himself might have considered the script over the top. It finished with Tigers coach Gus Malzahn employing a highly creative offensive formation on fourth down that sealed the victory. With Auburn punter Arryn Siposs split wide to the right, the confused Tide left 12 players on the field. With the Alabama penalty, Auburn retained possession and gleefully ran out the clock. Nick Saban was not gleeful.

The two Bama fans who stood in front of me at D/FW were still sullen a week later and took what I considered to be a surprising view of what had happened at Jordan-Hare Stadium. Auburn’s win was a good thing for Alabama fans, they concluded. It prevented Bama from being embarrassed in the playoff. After all, the Tide had already lost once going into the Auburn game (to LSU at home).

While we learn at an early age never to say never, it’s difficult to envision another college football program matching what Nick Saban has accomplished at Alabama. Yet some fans fear being embarrassed in a national playoff game? This apparently is what leads Saban to go off about self-absorbed Crimson Tide fans.

Not that there aren’t overreactive Auburn fans. Consider the contretemps that have accompanied a disappointing head coach’s tenure, virtually a staple in the post-Ralph Jordan era. But the preceding airport anecdote would seem to uphold the stance on the difference between Auburn and Alabama football fans taken by Paul Finebaum, recognized as an expert on the comportment of college football fans in the state of Alabama given how much time he has spent on the phone with them through the years. Finebaum, as stated in his 2014 book about SEC football, portrays Alabama as the New York Yankees of college football with fans who bristle at anything short of ultimate success. There are far fewer bandwagon fans rooting for Auburn, he contends. According to Finebaum, most Tigers fans either attended the school, have some sort of connection or are the reciprocal of bandwagon fans – those who pull for the underdog.

Let’s review what Auburn athletic teams achieved during a recent 10-year period. The football team won the national championship in 2010 and came within minutes of winning it again three years later. The basketball team reached the Final Four in 2019 and was seconds from reaching the national final. The baseball team that same year played in the College World Series and returned in 2021 after being picked to finish last in the SEC West. Over on the women’s side, the equestrian team won five national titles from 2011 through ’19. If we pushed back another 15 years, we could include 13 collective national banners hung over the pool by the men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams plus the championship won by the women’s outdoor track and field team.

For all of the Crimson Tide’s gridiron successes since Paul Bryant’s early years as coach, Auburn has had a way of beating Bama on the gridiron at some of the most inopportune times for those at the Capstone beginning with the 1972 upset – Alabama favored by between 14 and 16 points – that prevented the Tide from playing for a national title in its bowl game. There was the 1989 debut of the series at Jordan-Hare Stadium, long awaited by Auburn people, when Alabama likewise came in unbeaten and No. 2 in the country; the series’ return to Tuscaloosa in 2000 for the first time since 1901; Chris Davis’ unimaginable run to end the 2013 game. (I highly recommend locating a video that shows the Auburn band’s reaction to the play synched with the incomparable radio call from the late Rod Bramblett and Stan Oh, my God! White.)

IMAGE%201%20-%202015%20tailgate.jpg

Even at an Auburn tailgate in 2015, Punt Bama Punt was fondly remembered. (Auburn University Photographic Services)

There’s no intent here to try to measure this rivalry against others that are also highly acclaimed, highly recognized across the country. But consider the following sequence of football games played between Auburn and Alabama from the relatively recent past:

2009 – Alabama wins national title

2010 – Auburn wins national title

2011-12 – Alabama wins national titles

2013 – Auburn comes within two minutes of winning the national title

Of course, the 2013 meeting saw Auburn deny Bama a chance to win an unprecedented third consecutive national championship. The Tide went into that game ranked first, the Tigers fourth.

For rivalry games that have determined a national champion, consider the following:

• Army was ranked No. 1 and beat No. 2 Navy in the service academies’ final games of the 1944 and ’45 seasons to earn the Black Knights those national titles.

• The back-to-back Florida-Florida State games to close the 1996 season provided a rare rivalry encore, akin to bringing back two heavyweight boxers for a rematch. No. 2 FSU beat No. 1 Florida 24-21 in Tallahassee to end the schools’ regular seasons, only to have the Sugar Bowl schedule them for a curtain call a month later. Inside the Superdome, No. 3 Florida dominated No. 1 Florida State 52-20. That win, combined with No. 2 Arizona State’s Rose Bowl loss to Ohio State, vaulted the Gators to their first national championship.

What certainly sets the Auburn-Alabama rivalry apart from every other one in college football is the abyss. The standoff. The athletic cold war. The 41-year dormancy during which the schools refused to allow their football teams to meet on the field beginning with the 1908 season and running through 1947 – an unofficial NCAA record for sustained bullheaded stubbornness. If you go decades and won’t play your in-state rival, does that indicate it does mean more?

A potential renewal of the series between Alabama and Alabama Polytechnic Institute (not technically named Auburn University until 1960) was on the front burner across much of the state early in 1948, including in the halls of state government in Montgomery. Jack Simms was the sports editor of Auburn’s student newspaper, The Auburn Plainsman, and was determined to learn first-hand during a visit to the Alabama campus what could be done to resume play. (Personal note: I took classes from Jack Simms in addition to David Housel.) Hoping at least to get some personal satisfaction if not a good story, I packed my overnight bag and made the trip between quarters, Simms wrote in the weekly paper’s April 7 edition, Needless to say I got neither a story or any satisfaction. The Crimson Tide’s football coach, Harold Red Drew, agreed to sit down with young Simms – what a student journalism coup! – but then told the reporter he couldn’t discuss the matter. The chairman of the school’s faculty athletics committee was A.B. Moore, who’d worked at the Capstone for more than 20 years. Moore also agreed to meet with Simms, for an hour, but said little. Frustrated, Simms then went to the people and was discouraged by what he heard. After talking with about 20 students, Simms found that very few even had an opinion on the subject: Most of them just don’t care. Until students of both schools earnestly want to see the schools play, and until pressure is placed firmly on the ‘powers that be,’ at Tuscaloosa, Alabama will continue to be one of the few states in which the leading schools don’t trade blows in sports.

But more was going on than the Bama personnel were telling young Simms. Much more. Early in 1948, Alabama president John Gallalee took Auburn president Ralph Brown Draughon aside at a meeting in Birmingham and suggested renewing the football series. A short time after Simms’ mission into hostile territory, Gallalee arranged for a mid-April meeting at a covert location – a school-owned farm near Alexander City – to hammer out an agreement. Bama was represented by Gallalee, Moore and Drew. The Auburn assemblage consisted of Draughon, athletic director Wilbur Hutsell, football coach Earl Brown and faculty athletic chairman Roger Allen.

Moore, Alabama’s faculty athletic chair, was a key figure in the effort and had a unique background among those involved. He was an Auburn graduate and served as a teaching assistant to history professor George Petrie – the George Petrie who organized Auburn’s first football team in 1892 and who, when still on campus in his late 70s, wrote the Auburn Creed in 1943 a few years before his death. On May 2, 1948, Auburn’s Draughon and Allen met with Gallalee and Moore in Birmingham to close the deal and announce a date for the game – December 4, 1948.

A few weeks later, the two school presidents and their aides appeared together at a Kiwanis luncheon at Auburn’s Mell Street Cafeteria and showcased their newfound harmony. The get-together included Jeff Beard, Auburn’s business manager for athletics, and Moore, the Auburn grad and longtime Alabama faculty member. Moore compared the relationship between the schools to a marriage: We have courted each other and are now on the honeymoon stage.

At the luncheon, the following song was performed to the tune of I’ve Been Working on the Railroad …

"We’ve been working on some football …

"Nigh on 40 years …

"We’ve been working on some football …

"‘Mid joys and smiles and tears …

"Can’t you hear the whistle blowing …

"Come, boys, shout the cry…

"Hurray, hurray for Alabama …

And good old A.P.I.

The 1948 game was scheduled for Birmingham’s Legion Field before an equally divided crowd. Alabama would be the designated home team, and the schools would alternate that designation throughout subsequent contracts that kept the game in Alabama’s Steel City. The Plainsman predictably splashed preview coverage clear across the top of the front page. After Alabama won 55-0, reporting of the day’s events in the next edition of The Plainsman was, well, somewhat more low-key. It consisted of two paragraphs; the second graph stated only that Auburn’s band looked great.

Little was then expected of the Tigers in the 1949 series encore, the first in which Auburn was the designated home team. Hence, the 14-13 victory was greatly hailed – the greatest victory in the program’s 58-year history, the student newspaper claimed. Consider The Plainsman’s depiction of the failed Bama PAT attempt in the final minute that sealed the upset, with Auburn All-American Travis Tidwell apparently looming out of the corner of the eye of Tide kicker Ed Salem: The suspense was agonizing – it must have been nothing short of paralyzing on the playing field. The kick sailed high, WIDE, and the Auburn victory was handsome!

Talk about your bad timing: Weeks after that game, Alabama’s president – the aforementioned John Gallalee, instrumental in the resumption of the series – was the featured speaker at Auburn’s winter-quarter graduation ceremony.

Maybe Auburn people and Alabama people have more in common than they’d like to think or admit to. Let me provide an example.

The Alabama-Auburn men’s basketball game played at jam-packed Auburn Arena on February 1, 2022, was a marquee event in the history of Auburn basketball. It was the first time the Tigers faced an SEC opponent while ranked first in the Associated Press poll. With the chance of Auburn sweeping both meetings played against Bama that season, many an AU student carried a broom to that night’s game.

Were emotions high? Out the roof. Yet before the tipoff, a ceremony took place at midcourt that contradicted the perception that Auburn people and Alabama people will simply never get along. It involved the leaders of the schools’ respective student cheering sections – Jacob Hillman on behalf of the Auburn Jungle, Blake Bullock representing Bama’s Crimson Chaos.

They came together to posthumously honor a previous president of Alabama’s student section. Cameron Luke Ratliff went by his middle name but was more well known in Tuscaloosa – and to those who grew to follow him on social media – as Fluffopotamus. Few if any could claim to be a bigger fan of Crimson Tide basketball than Fluff. He attended nearly every game home or away as well as those at postseason sites. Fluff was months away from graduating when he died in April 2021 of causes related to COVID-19. He was 23 years old.

Fluff naturally had been honored at Alabama’s Coleman Coliseum at the beginning of the Tide’s home season. But a similar recognition was about to take place amid thousands of Tigers fans, as many as could fit in the building. Auburn’s Hillman and Alabama’s Bullock each wore a plaid jacket, which matched the attire of choice worn by Fluff at Crimson Tide games. Hillman held aloft a poster-sized photo that showed Fluff plying his fan trade at an Alabama game.

Chris Conway, the arena’s public-address announcer, told the crowd the following: It’s rivalry night in Auburn, and there’s nothing like the passion of the fans, especially the student sections from both schools. Tonight, Jacob and the Auburn Jungle are setting aside the rivalry to honor Alabama super fan and loyal member of the Crimson Chaos – Luke Ratliff, who passed away in April of 2021 – by wearing his signature blazer and holding this sign in his memory (as Auburn’s Hillman held the poster aloft). For those that knew ‘Fluff’ or saw him in action, he helped make this game special. So, Auburn Family, let’s give a round of applause in honoring Cameron Luke Ratliff!

The football rivalry has only grown with the games shifting to the campuses; I’m among those who believe the Iron Bowl nickname should no longer apply with the matchup having left Birmingham, once proclaimed The Football Capital of the South, and leaving behind the relatively split crowds.

Is it possible to identify the rivalry’s peak? Jack Doane, a longtime sports editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, was convinced he had just witnessed the best of it in 1970, when juniors Pat Sullivan and Terry Beasley rallied the Tigers from a 17-0 first-quarter deficit to win 33-28. Doane wrote: Anything that happens in the Auburn-Alabama football series from here to eternity will be mere window-dressing.

Eternity turned out to be no more than two years, thanks to Bill Newton, David Langner and the rest of the 1972 Amazin’s. During the 1980s, there would be Bo Jackson over the top and Van Tiffin’s 52-yard field goal. The Cam-back of 2010. And Kick Six in 2013. And four overtimes in 2021.

Maybe there’s more appeal to being an Auburn fan than what’s contained in Paul Finebaum’s theory. Let’s accept the comparison of Bama to the Yankees and add a baseball link that was made to Auburn’s 1972 Tigers after they snapped the long winning streaks of Tennessee and Ole Miss four games into the season – the nickname of the Amazin’s. That was borrowed from baseball’s 1969 New York Mets, who won the World Series after stumbling through the franchise’s first seven seasons. The beloved baseball writer Roger Angell sat through six consecutive home losses by the hapless original Mets of 1962 and was struck by the contrasting comportment between that woeful team’s fans to those who gathered only a few miles away at Yankee Stadium, where the home team had won 20 pennants and 16 World Series titles in the past 30 years. The Yankee fan expected – demanded – near perfection and behaved, as Angell wrote in The New Yorker, with the stolidity, the smugness, and the arrogance of holders of large blocks of blue-chip stocks. The Met fans screamed like crazy for a team that lost early and often, often in slapstick fashion that defied baseball reality.

Angell concluded: These exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us.

Maybe more Auburn than Alabama in most people?

A curious converse is the level of celebrity that some of Auburn’s top athletes have achieved after leaving campus. The little land grant school (OK, enrollment of 31,000 for fall 2022, so maybe no longer little) can boast possibly the most versatile athlete of modern times in Bo Jackson, one of the most recognizable figures in sportscasting in Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer Charles Barkley and maybe the most prominent voice in any of the Olympic sports in International Swimming Hall of Famer Rowdy Gaines. Somewhere close to that category of celebrity is Frank Thomas, who arrived at Auburn on a football scholarship, played 19 seasons of major league baseball and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014. Add in Olympic all-around gymnastic champion Suni Lee?

The title of this book is unapologetically borrowed from the email signature that’s used by a member of the 1972 Auburn football team, defensive back Roger Mitchell – Your TMFL. Mitchell was judged too small for an athletic scholarship to any major college football program after graduating from Eufaula High in 1969. He dreamed for years of playing football for Auburn and walked on after spending one season playing for the Coast Guard Academy. Mitchell earned an Auburn athletic scholarship and played vital roles in signature victories in 1971 and ’72. I started using ‘Teammates for Life’ in the ’80s as we were expanding Jordan-Hare Stadium and raising funds for the Auburn Football Lettermen Club and our lounge (located within the east side of the stadium), Mitchell told me. Certainly, it is exactly how we feel and how we respond to one another. Coach Pat Dye picked up on it and, on numerous occasions, he praised us for giving back to Auburn and helping out our teammates when they needed help.

I hope Auburn football fans and sports fans in general will enjoy – and even Alabama fans can appreciate – the story of the 1972 Tigers, for what they achieved against the odds on the football field back then and what they’ve meant to each other and done for each other since.

War Eagle,

Jeff Miller, June 2022

I’m putting this team at the top of the list.

Ralph Shug Jordan, December 1972

"We just had a bunch of guys that were winners.

Didn’t have any standouts, but every one of them I’d go to war with right now."

Bill Newton, March 2021

To the memory of B.D. _ 1939-2022

CHAPTER 1

I’D RATHER BEAT THE COW COLLEGE.

H alloween 1972 in Auburn still felt much like summer, which wasn’t all that odd in east central Alabama. But only weeks later in mid-November, autumn on the Plains really felt like autumn. The thermometer sometimes struggled to push into the mid-60s in the afternoon, and overnight lows in the upper 40s required campus attire that was more substantial than the typical Auburn student’s T-shirt and cutoff shorts.

If the weather wasn’t an indication that fall definitely had taken root, seeing the university publish its final-exam schedule for fall quarter ’72 (December 4-7) certainly brought home the point. Another sign of the season came when the Student Government Association designated an official cheer to use when Auburn’s football team would meet the Alabama Crimson Tide to close its schedule in the annual Iron Bowl at Legion Field in Birmingham on Saturday, December 2: Go back … go back … go back to the woods. Yo’ team ain’t got no spirit, and yo’ coach ain’t no good. SGA vice-president Tommy Phillips admitted that composition wasn’t an original work; it was borrowed from a Mississippi high school.

Mid-November back then was also the time when the invitations to college football’s bowl games were extended through a system that we now consider archaic compared with today’s College Football Playoff selection committee and the accompanying slotting mechanism that marries conference finishes to berths in the dozens of games. (There were 11 bowls then.) In 1972, back-room wheeling and dealing for bowl slots was completed after the games that were played on November 11 and determined the lineup barring an unfathomable upset or two that might occur during the season’s final weeks. The announcements of postseason couplings were allowed to be made a week later, on the evening of November 18.

The Auburn Tigers had no game scheduled on November 11, the result of relative 11th-hour schedule maneuvering back in the spring by longtime Auburn coach Ralph Shug Jordan. Auburn was originally slated to open on September 23 with a home game against independent Tennessee-Chattanooga one week before a stern test to begin Southeastern Conference play in Birmingham against the Tennessee Volunteers, who would probably field a team ranked in the preseason top 10 by the Associated Press. But Jordan, about to begin his 22nd season as Auburn’s head coach, was concerned because Tennessee was scheduled to open its season on September 9 and would come to Legion Field for its fourth game to face an Auburn team playing only its second, with only a game against lightly regarded Chattanooga under its belt. Jordan successfully convinced the SEC to move Auburn’s November 11 game against Mississippi State, to be played in Jackson, Mississippi, to September 9 – with State’s blessing. Hence, the final weeks of Auburn’s revamped schedule featured an off day on November 11, followed by the final campus home game on November 18 against Georgia, followed by another off week, then the finale against Alabama, with the Crimson Tide serving as that year’s designated home team at the so-called neutral site (more later on the neutrality of the Iron Bowl at Legion Field).

For Auburn football fans, mid-November 1972 was an exciting time, unexpectedly so considering what had been anticipated months earlier. The Tigers were picked to finish in the bottom half of the 10-team conference after the loss of 11 starters from the standout 1971 squad that earned the school’s first invitation to play in the Sugar Bowl; most notable among eight lost offensive starters were the ’71 Heisman Trophy winner, quarterback Pat Sullivan, and his All-American sidekick, receiver Terry Beasley. Remember the demise of Auburn reference in the preseason SEC preview written by Ed Shearer, the Associated Press’ Atlanta-based college football writer for the Southeast. Yet Auburn reached the November 11 off date with only one defeat, that coming in mid-October at LSU. An Auburn team that began the season excluded from the A.P.’s Top 20 national rankings had determinedly inched its way up to No. 11. The spirited Tigers likely would be favored at home against an inconsistent Georgia team, then most assuredly be underdogs against Alabama, and who could say if Auburn would be favored against a yet-undetermined bowl opponent.

On November 11, the eyes of college football fans across the state were focused on Legion Field and that afternoon’s nationally televised showdown between the only two unbeatens in the SEC: No. 2 Alabama (8-0) against No. 6 LSU (7-0) with the Crimson Tide favored by nine points. After LSU hammered Auburn 35-7 in mid-October, Paul Cox, the sports editor of the Opelika-Auburn News, was told by a colleague: I’d say LSU is about three touchdowns better than Alabama. Well, no. Bama, led by its Louisianan senior quarterback, Terry Davis, cruised to a 35-21 victory over the Bayou Bengals. That clinched Alabama’s second consecutive conference championship even with the Iron Bowl still ahead. LSU quarterback Bert Jones, the National Football League’s second overall draftee the following January, dejectedly told reporters after the game, Alabama has more class than the rest of the SEC put together.

Considering LSU had handed Auburn its lone defeat of the season by four touchdowns, there was little reason for any neutral observer to consider Auburn in the same class as Alabama. LSU coach Charlie McClendon only added fuel to that fire when he deemed the 1972 Crimson Tide a hell of a lot better than last year. In 1971, Alabama had ripped through its 11-game schedule in dominant fashion. That included a 31-7 win over Auburn in a battle of unbeatens – arguably the biggest Iron Bowl played to date – during which the Tide got the better of Sullivan, who’d been named the Heisman winner two days earlier.

One day after Alabama’s 1972 humbling of LSU, Tide coach Paul Bear Bryant abandoned his typical poor-mouthing of his squads and declared second-ranked Alabama to be the best in the country. Said he changed his mind after seeing what Bama did to the Bayou Bengals, that his team was better than top-ranked and likewise unbeaten Southern Cal.

Much of the national discussion going into the day’s games focused on where Bryant would send Alabama for New Year’s with no chance to play No. 1 USC, which appeared headed to the Rose Bowl as champion of the Pacific-8 Conference and locked into a date against a team from the Big Ten Conference as dictated by contractual agreements. The other three major bowls – Miami’s Orange Bowl, New Orleans’ Sugar Bowl and Dallas’ Cotton Bowl – featured at-large berths. Bryant, with the highest ranked available team, found himself in a position that he greatly enjoyed – kingmaker for deciding the schools that would fill the major bowls’ open slots.

The day after the Alabama-LSU game, Bryant claimed to have given little or no thought to his team’s postseason destination and opponent: I’ve had no time to think about bowls … but if there is a choice, we’ll let the players decide. Crimson Tide quarterback Terry Davis said he would prefer a trip to New Orleans or Dallas over a return to Miami for a change. It could have been that Bama’s 32-point loss to Nebraska 10 months earlier at the Orange Bowl, the only loss of Davis’ 21 starts to date with the Tide, influenced the quarterback’s thinking. A day later during the Sunday afternoon airing of "The Bear Bryant Show," Alabama’s coach certainly appeared to have put some thought into the matter and even expressed a preference for a bowl foe: I want to play somebody who has kept improving all season, and Texas certainly has done that.

Well, Texas had dusted itself off from an embarrassing 27-0 loss to Oklahoma in mid-October. The Longhorns came out of November 11’s play with a 6-1 record, were ranked ninth in the A.P. poll and sat securely in the driver’s seat to claim their fifth straight berth in the Cotton Bowl Classic as champions of the Southwest Conference. Another factor that The Bear cited was the Horns’ longtime coach; Darrell Royal, winner of multiple national titles like Bryant, was one of Bryant’s confidants within the college coaching fraternity. When Alabama sputtered through its 1969-70 seasons with records of 6-5 and 6-5-1, Bryant summoned members of Royal’s coaching staff to Tuscaloosa to teach the wishbone offense that Texas employed beginning in 1968 and used as the engine to drive its 1969 and ’70 national championship teams. The triple-option formation was then greatly responsible for Bama’s immediate return to glory in ’71.

It required only one more day for the perceived Alabama-Texas pairing in the Cotton Bowl to appear all but certain as the Sugar and Orange dominoes then fell. The Sugar Bowl worked deals with Oklahoma and Penn State, and the Orange Bowl lined up a return trip for Nebraska to face Notre Dame. A one-loss Auburn team surely would have contended for one of the major bowl invitations, but Auburn surely wasn’t assumed to complete its schedule as a one-loss team with Alabama looming. The Tigers were instead paired in Jacksonville’s Gator Bowl – unofficially considered the best of the non-major bowls – against the Big Eight’s third-place team, Colorado.

But an Auburn home win on November 18 over Georgia, despite the visitor’s 6-3 record, wasn’t a sure bet given the recent history of the two rivals who formed the Deep South’s oldest continuous series (not counting war years during which one or both schools didn’t field a team). The Tigers had lost their last three games at home to the Bulldogs. And Auburn would play without senior running backs Terry Henley and James Owens because of injuries; Henley was leading the SEC in rushing yards, and Owens was Henley’s invaluable escort blocking from the backfield. But the Tigers took care of their business anyway with a 27-10 win over Georgia on a cloudy, warm day at Cliff Hare Stadium with an ABC regional audience looking on. Giddy Auburn students filed out already looking eagerly two weeks down the road: Go to hell, Alabama, go to hell!

Alabama’s assignment on November 18 was to routinely dispose of independent Virginia Tech (5-3-1 going into play) at Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa. Easily dispose of the visitors the Tide did, 52-13. Bryant afterward officially accepted the Cotton Bowl invitation from Field Scovell, chairman of the game’s selection committee, and explained to the media assemblage his reasoning for choosing Dallas over Miami or New Orleans: In the last five years, we’ve had a poor bowl record (0-4-1), and I know we’ve had a poor record against Texas (we being Bryant’s personal 0-2-1 mark, including one loss while coaching Texas A&M in the late 1950s). As you know, Darrell Royal is a close, warm friend of mine, but I’ve never had a team to beat him, so I think I’m pleased to get the opportunity. Oh, and Bryant added: It was our seniors who really made the decision. Tide safety Lanny Norris, among those seniors allegedly burdened with making the weighty postseason choice, clarified the process and smiled while