re: Alabama Football, carrying the torch for the South since 1926

LINK

Here is that guy's writeup for the 1925 season. Very interesting stuff.

Some highlights:

1) The Rose Bowl was not the "defacto national championship" as Bama fans like to claim. In fact, Alabama was not even the Rose Bowl's first choice.

2) The Rose Bowl's first choice was Dartmouth, widely considered the nation's best team. Dartmouth turned the Rose Bowl down.

quote:

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Dartmouth was invited to the Rose Bowl to play 10-0-1 Washington, but they were already widely considered the national champions, and the players didn't want to give up their Christmas holidays, so they voted to reject the offer. That was critical for Alabama, who would not have emerged decades later as the consensus national champion among retroactive selectors without that game.

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3) West Coast football was disrespected almost as much as Southern football. The West Coast did have some breakthrough teams like Cal in 1920 and Washington State in 1915. However, they were still considered less competitive than the East Coast and Midwest teams.

Hence, beating Washington was not as significant as Alabama likes to claim.

quote:

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Alabama fans remember the 1926 Rose Bowl as the "Game that changed the South." The team was greeted by cheering throngs across the South on their train ride home. The South had previously been disrespected as a football region, and supposedly this game changed all that. More importantly, the South was apparently suffering from low regional self-esteem in a general sense, stemming from the still-lingering effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and this game supposedly gave the whole region joy and a sense of regional pride ("SEC! SEC! SEC!"). An oft-quoted Southern historian called the game "the most significant event in Southern football history." There is some truth to all this, but Alabama football history books and articles have obscured the reality of this game beyond recognition in a blizzard of heroicizing hyperbole, and in the process they have erased previous and more important accomplishments of other Southern football teams.

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4) Nobody proclaimed 1925 Alabama national champions at the time. Unlike with 1917 Georgia Tech, there is no evidence that anyone alive (outside of Alabama) in 1925 considered Alabama to be the champions.

5) Michigan and Pitt also have claims to the 1925 MNC, which are addressed and dismissed in the link.