re: off season, looking back in history, for the whiners about how hard their SEC schedule is

Gonna need to go a few years further on back there, skippy. And Bryant already wanted to recruit black players years before but wasn't allowed by the powers that be. The general thinking is that he scheduled the Sam "Bam" Cunningham game with USC specifically for the purpose of demonstrating to those powers that without black players their beloved football program was going to fall irretrievably behind.