Bama has carried y’all’s asses for 97+ years

A formal rebuttal to Chicken’s annual nonsense.

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The NCAA recognizes college football champions dating back to 1869. Most Southern schools began playing in the late 1890s — Alabama’s program started in 1892 — and by the 1920s, college football had grown popular enough that the idea of conferences was taking hold.

With the active support of university president Mike Denny — for whom Bryant-Denny Stadium is in part named — Alabama’s football program strengthened in the early 1920s. By the 1925 season, head coach Wallace Wade led the Tide to a 9-0 regular-season record.

Back then, the Rose Bowl was the only postseason game; not only were there no playoffs, there were no alternative or second-tier bowls. It was Rose or bust. The game pitted regular-season champions from both coasts, and in 1925, the champion of the Pacific Coast Conference — the predecessor to the Pac-12 — was Washington. The “Purple Tornado,” a nickname Washington really ought to bring back, posted nine undefeated seasons in a row from 1908 to 1916.

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And some brag about winning 29-in-a-row.

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The Tide’s undefeated record didn’t impress the sportswriters and coaches of the day. (Sound familiar?) But after yet another college-football-is-too-professional controversy led Dartmouth, Michigan, Colgate and Princeton to decline invitations to the postseason game, No. 4-ranked Alabama should have been the next up.

Even then, the Rose Bowl committee fought the idea. “I’ve never heard of Alabama as a football team,” one committee member scoffed, “and I can’t take a chance on mixing a lemon with a rose.” The desperate committee finally got over its biases and invited Alabama four weeks before the game.

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Few outside the South gave Alabama even a prayer of a chance. Washington had dominated its opposition all season, shutting out six of its 10 opponents, allowing no more than 14 points in any game, and winning its first three games by a total of 223-0.

Outside commentators, meanwhile, gleefully piled on the Tide. Famed humorist Will Rogers, presaging message boards by decades, dismissed the Tide’s hometown as “Tusca-loser.” One sportswriter picked Washington to win by 51 points. Another said the Huskies would “blow the Crimson Tide back across the continent as a pale pink stream.”

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I didn’t realize that WillyT’s great-great grandpappy was a much more talented troll than his current progeny.

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"Southern football is not recognized or respected,” Wade said in his pregame speech. “Boys, here's your chance to change that forever.”

"Southern football is not recognized or respected,” Wade said in his pregame speech. “Boys, here's your chance to change that forever.”

A late Washington touchdown wasn’t enough to close the gap, and Alabama claimed its first national championship. Washington head coach Enoch Bradshaw was so incensed he left the field without shaking Wade’s hand.

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Alabama’s 1926 train trip back across the country became one long celebration. At a stop in New Orleans, a thousand locals met the train at the station to praise the Tide. Red and white flags accompanied Alabama all the way back to Tuscaloosa…

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Louisianans…riding dick for a hundred years.

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It would be a stretch to say that the 1926 Rose Bowl was responsible for the rise of Southern football; the social, cultural and economic shifts that turned the South into a 1960s behemoth and a 2000s juggernaut took time to develop. But that Rose Bowl upended perceptions of Southern football. No longer could the Harvards, Michigans and Princetons of the college football world assume that the South couldn’t compete at their level. Alabama, for instance, would play in five more Rose Bowls over the next 20 years, winning three, losing one and tying one.

Not only that, the Rose Bowl gave the South reason to believe that it could compete on a national level. It would be decades before the South would produce more than the occasional national champion (Alabama, Georgia Tech, TCU, Texas A&M), but once Auburn won the title in 1957 and Bear Bryant took over Alabama in 1958, Southern schools began claiming at least shares of the national title every few years. By the 1990s, as the rise of Florida State, Miami, Tennessee and Florida gave way to Alabama, Auburn, LSU and Georgia, the South’s college football preeminence was both complete and unquestioned.

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Thank you for your support

tl;dr away.