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Chapter One

GENESIS

1892 * 1918

TIME WAS, THERE WAS NO FOOTBALL AT ALABAMA. In the autumn of 1892 the University was celebrating its sixty-first year. A quarter century earlier, in the waning days of the Civil War, most of the campus had been burned to the ground by federal troops even as the student Corps of Cadets made a valiant but futile attempt to defend it. Aside from the task of rebuilding the school, little had changed in those twenty-seven years; the University was still a small military college, along the lines of the Virginia Military Institute. There were no women students. There was no such game as football.

But within a few years much of the old system was swept away. The military order would be abolished. Women would become a major part of the school. And there would be football and the building of glorious dynasties of that game until the name of The University of Alabama became synonymous with the sport.

There are still a skulking few who say this denigrates the University. They would argue it's not the aim of a great college; football detracts from the academic mission, siphons off critical resources, distracts students from their intended goals, makes a mockery of higher education, and so on. That is all hogwash, as we shall see ...

* * *

Over the last century, Alabama's football teams have played over one hundred opponents in more than one thousand games and won nearly 75 percent of them, a phenomenal and proud record. The Crimson Tide is the third winningest major college team in the nation. It has outscored its opposition more than two to one. It has won twelve national championships and leads the Southeastern Conference with twenty-one SEC championships. Its nearest rival in conference championships, Tennessee, has won thirteen. More than 100 Bama players have made First Team All-America and 250 First Team All-SEC. Alabama has sent 175 players on to the National Football League, including such all-time greats as Bob Baumhower, John Hannah, Don Hutson, Lee Roy Jordan, Joe Namath, Ozzie Newsome, Kenny Stabler, Bart Starr, and Dwight Stephenson. Its team members have gone on to become judges, lawyers, doctors, prominent businessmen, and stellar football coaches--as well as governors and congressmen. A number of Alabama players have been elected Phi Beta Kappa. Over the years The University of Alabama football team has elated millions of fans. There is no finer football program in the country and it is a splendid credit to the University, to the state, and to the nation. But to understand how all this came about, we must turn back to the beginning, many years ago.

* * *

The University of Alabama had its origin as a land grant college only a few years after the Creek Indian Nation was ousted from the central part of the state. Congress in 1818 set aside thousands of what had now become federal acres for the purpose of establishing a university, but thirteen more years would pass before buildings were erected and the school opened its doors to a class of fifty-two freshmen. Organized physical sports were virtually unknown in those days; the games of baseball, basketball, and football were yet to be invented, and students took their solace at the card table, the racetrack, the saloon, and in some instances, the church.

In 1860, as the cataclysm of civil war loomed near, the University was set up as a military college--but for reasons of discipline, not impending war--and remained so until almost the turn of the century. After the war, athletics gradually became part of the program. Baseball was the first organized team sport, and among other activities were gymnastics, track and field, fencing, and tennis.

Then in 1892 a young man named William G. Little arrived on the scene. A native of Livingston, Alabama, Little had attended Phillips-Exeter Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in hopes of going on to an Ivy League college. But the death of his brother brought him closer to home at The University of Alabama and he enrolled in the fall of 1892 with a pair of cleats, a leather football, and tales of the new sport that had captured the imagination of the Northeast and Middle West.

Something called football had been played in America since the early 1800s, but it was more closely akin to soccer in that the ball could only be kicked or batted, not carried, and later evolved into a rugby-style game in which the ball could be kicked on the ground, batted, or carried, and tackling was permitted to keep an opponent from scoring. But this early version more resembled an uncouth brawl than a sport and was banned on many college campuses before the Civil War. Nevertheless, on Saturday, November 6, 1869, the first intercollegiate football game was played between between Princeton and Rutgers before one hundred spectators in New Brunswick, New Jersey. There were twenty-five players to a side. One Rutgers professor was so appalled at what he saw, he stormed off shouting, "You men will come to no Christian end!"

Harvard had another version of the game, allowing the ball to be carried, and eventually it was agreed among football-playing schools that touch-downs (a rugby term meaning that if the ball was carried it must be physically "touched down" on the ground inside the goal line) would be permitted. Other refinements quickly followed. Team sizes were reduced to fifteen men (a standard rugby team) and then to eleven. The dimensions of the playing field were reduced from 140 by 70 yards (a rugby field) to 110 by 531/2. In 1880 a major change was instituted: the notion of continuous play was replaced by the concept of continuous possession of the ball, meaning that the team having the ball when downed could stop kick it forward, or give it to the quarterback rather than having to scuffle for it all the time, as in rugby.

Walter Camp, of Yale, regarded as the father of modern football, was active in the new Intercollegiate Football Association, precursor of the NCAA, and his innovations became the bedrock of what we now know as football He inaugurated the notion of having downs in which a team could keep the ball continuously so long as they either gained five yards in three downs or lost ten yards in three downs. Otherwise, they had to give the ball up. It was an odd system compared with the modern game, but at least this allowed for the planning and setting up of individual plays.

At that point, manpower on the field was usually formed up into a notorious and sometimes deadly disposition called the "Flying Wedge." In this savage arrangement, the linemen either held hands or locked arms and charged at the opposing team in a "vee" configuration with the ball carrier in the pocket, colliding into each other full speed with heads and bodies. The idea on either side was to create something similar to what occurs in bowling alleys. In a single season twenty-six deaths and seventy crippling injuries nationwide were attributed to this cruel practice (there were of course few pads or headgear) and a movement was begun to outlaw the game entirely. But this was finally headed off by none other than President Theodore Roosevelt, who got all teams to agree that henceforth such mass formations would be illegal.

Meantime, football was quickly sweeping into the Midwest, West, and upper South and rules were further refined to include forward passing, tackling below the waist, and a fixed system of timed quarters and halves.

Back at Alabama, young, sturdy William Little persuaded a score of his classmates to organize a football squad. Of the new game, Little declared, "Football is the game of the future in college life. Players will be forced to live a most ascetic life, on a diet of rare beef and pork, to say nothing of rice pudding for dessert, for additional courage and fortitude, to stand the bumps and injuries. Little was elected captain, and a man named Eugene Beaumont, who had learned something about football at the University of Pennsylvania, was selected as coach. Felix Tarrant Bush was manager. Thus was The University of Alabama athletic department born.

Football was not unknown below the Mason-Dixon Line at this time. The first game to be played in the Southeast was in Kentucky in 1880. In Alabama, Auburn had fielded a team the year previous in 1891. But the game for the most part was still a club sport, like rugby. Students were in charge and the senior class was responsible for uniforms, coach's pay, and traveling expenses. To offset this, they sold tickets to the games.

The uniform of Alabama's first team was white with crimson stockings and the big letters U of A on the chest. It had some cotton padding at the knees and elbows but there were no shoulder pads or helmets. The basic football play during this period was still the Flying Wedge. Alabama opened its debut football season November 11, 1892, with what amounted to a practice game, played against an inauspicious opponent--a team picked from various Birmingham schools, and calling itself Birmingham High School. Alabama won the game handily, 56-0.

Flushed with this initial victory, the Cadets of Alabama, as they were known, played on the following day their first real opponent, the Birmingham Athletic Club, at Lakeview Park. Under intercollegiate rules of the period, a touchdown counted for four points, an after-touchdown conversion two points, and a field goal five. Newspaper accounts say the grandstand was filled with gaily dressed men and women and the bleachers were decorated with colored bunting.

When the Cadets of Alabama took the field it was apparent they were woefully outweighed by their more mature opponents, many of whom had played college football back east. Accounts state that the Alabama players "looked like boys" compared to the Athletic Club team. In fact, Little, a guard, was one of the heavier players for Alabama, at 173 pounds. Alabama scored on a "guard around" play by Little in the first half, but missed the try for extra points. Toward the end of the fourth quarter Alabama still led 4-0, but in the waning moments an Athletics player named J. P. Ross, who had played rugby football in Ireland, put an astonishing 63-yard dropkick through the uprights to win the game. To demonstrate the innocence which marked that gilded age, the referee of the game was none other than the Alabama coach, Eugene Beaumont.

A month later, Alabama, "showing a decided improvement," beat the Birmingham Athletic Club on the same site 14-0, and in February 1893 played its first game against Auburn before four thousand fans at Lakeview Park. Football was so new that most of the spectators did not understand it, and the programs of the day contained elaborate explanations of how the game was played. Alabama lost, 32-22, but a magnificent tradition had been set into motion that would carry the University on to glory for a hundred and more years. Of that original little team of Cadets in 1892, much was promised. 0f its number, one rose to become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, another two-term governor of Alabama, three became lawyers, another was a judge, one became a physician, another a state senator, and the rest prominent businessmen. Though they hardly could have known it at the time, they were the, vanguard of the Crimson Tide.

* * *

The following year, 1893, the Cadets had lost most of their star players, including team captain Little, to graduation. They had such an unfavorable season that one player, Hill Ferguson, who went on to serve on the University's Board of Trustees for forty years, remarked that "nobody seemed to have enough interest to take a picture of the team." They won no games and were even beaten by Sewanee, 20-0. It must be noted though, that during these years the total enrollment at Alabama was less than two hundred men, and in terms of available manpower, the University was not yet superior to colleges like Sewanee, Centre of Kentucky, or others now thought of as "small schools." The Corolla , then in its first year as Bama's official year-book, tersely observed in respect to Coach Beaumont: "We were unfortunate in securing a coach. After keeping him for a short time, we found that his knowledge of the game was very limited. We therefore got rid of him.

In 1893 Bama had a new coach, Eli Abbott. Abbott had been a tackle and fullback on the inaugural team of 1892 after being solicited away from his job as foreman on Warrior River Lock 17--under construction at the time--by then coach Beaumont, who had known him at Penn. Abbott was sort of a wandering football player, having played at Penn and Mississippi A&M before landing the job at the lock. At the urging of Beaumont and others he enrolled at Alabama to get a degree in engineering. Fortunes began to improve under Abbott. Alabama lost the opener to Ole Miss 6-0 but, with the 155-pound Coach Abbott himself playing fullback, the team roared back to defeat Tulane 18-6. When they next encountered Sewanee they beat them, too, even though Abbott was ejected from the game for fighting. In the final match against Auburn, Coach Abbott again became the center of controversy when the Auburnites complained that he was being paid a salary. The objection was denied and Alabama went on to win 18-0.

The next season, 1895, Alabama resumed its seesaw reputation, losing all of its games to Georgia, Tulane, LSU, and Auburn by a combined point score of 112-12. But sixty more years would pass before an Alabama football team had a season as wretched as that.

In 1896, while the Olympic Games were being renewed in Paris after a lapse of fifteen hundred years, the University's Board of Trustees for some odd reason concluded it was undignified for its athletic teams to play games off campus, and Alabama had a terrible time finding opponents. They played only three football games that year but won two of them, including a 20-0 victory against a new opponent, Mississippi State. It then went from bad to worse: in 1897 only one game was played, in which Alabama beat the Tuscaloosa Athletic Club 6-0--on campus, of course. And the next year, with the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, there was no team at all, due to lack of opposition. The Corolla sourly noted: "In reviewing our past athletic season, we find very little to be proud of ... handicapped by the stringent law of the Trustees, which prevented our traveling...."

But in 1899 things changed for the better. According, again, to the Corolla , "For the past four years our teams have been kept at home like children, but this year the guardians of the University have allowed them to visit twice a year in charge of a nurse to keep them from harm." This intended protection was not always accomplished, however, according to the description of the Tulane game that year by Alabama guard Thomas M. Wert, who testified afterward: "They had prizefighters, dockhands on their team. I don't know if they had any students. They kicked me, trampled me, and sometimes bit me, all at the same time."

As the century turned with the soon-to-be-assassinated President William McKinley in the White House, the Alabama football team of 1900 compiled a measly 2-3 season, losing to Auburn in Montgomery by the humiliating score of 53-5. During halftime of that game a dispute broke out between an Alabama fan, Temple Seibels, the city solicitor, and Auburn tackle Michael H. Harvey. Seibels threw his hat into the air and when it landed on the field, Harvey mockingly kicked it as an imaginary field goal. Fans intervened in the ensuing altercation and next year, Harvey was named coach of The University of Alabama football team.

Harvey, however, only lasted a year. Alabama defeated Ole Miss and Mississippi State but lost to Auburn and tied with Georgia as well as a formidable new opponent, the University of Tennessee; the Tennessee game, held in Birmingham, was called on account of darkness after several thousand spectators rushed onto the field to protest an umpire's decision. Despite a decent season, Harvey had lost to Auburn and this spelled his demise.

For the next half decade, Alabama had a succession of coaches lasting but a year, including the ubiquitous Abbott, who returned in 1902 to lead the team to a 5-3 season. The team lost to another new opponent, the University of Texas, but defeated Marion Military Institute by a score of 81-0. Around this time a sportswriter used the term, "The Thin Red Line," to describe the Alabama team, a phrase no doubt borrowed from Rudyard Kipling's recent poem "Tommy," about the British soldier:

Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that,

An' Tommy, 'ow's your soul?

But it's "Thin red line of 'ero's,"

When the drums begin to roll--

In any event, Alabama again failed to win over Auburn and by next year Coach Abbott was no more.

In 1903, under the tutoring of coach W. B. Blount, a Yalie, the Alabama squad, averaging a mere 148 pounds per man, compiled a 3-4 season, losing to Vanderbilt, Mississippi State, Sewanee, and Cumberland. But it beat LSU, Tennessee, and, most importantly, Auburn, which meant that Coach Blount kept his job another year. The University's first ten-game season came in 1904, with seven wins and three losses. But the team failed to suppress Auburn that year and Coach Blount became history.

By now Henry Ford had just sold his first automobile, the Wright brothers had launched the first airplane, and the first World Series of baseball had been played. In football, certain improvements and changes were being made in equipment. A crude version of shoulder pads was coming into fashion, consisting of bulky wads of cotton sewn into the jersey. Some players had begun to wear thin leather helmets with flaps to protect the ears. The football itself was becoming less oval and more pointed at the ends, which made for better passing, but it did not kick as well. (There would be no more sixty-five-yard dropkicks for a field goal.) Alabama's game jersey was now crimson and the stockings crimson with white stripes. Also, with the admission of women to the University a decade earlier, the football squad began enlisting some of them as "sponsors," forerunners of the modern cheerleader.

The 1905 season opened under coach Jack Leavenworth, another Yalie, and Alabama ended up with a barely winning 6-4 season. They did, however, beat Auburn 30-0 before four thousand spectators in Birmingham, but an embarrassing 42-6 loss to Sewanee sent Coach Leavenworth packing.

There now arrived at Tuscaloosa John W. H. "Doc" Pollard, a Dartmouth man, to coach the 1906 team. During his four years at Alabama he compiled a 21-4-5 record. Pollard was not only innovative; he was ferocious. His players feared him, and with good reason. Following a listless 6-0 win over Maryville in the first game of the season, Pollard ordered his team straight onto the practice field and put it through a grueling hours-long scrimmage against the scrubs. His one loss that first year was a humiliating 78-0 defeat at the hands of Vanderbilt, which one observer described as "a farce." Fact was, injuries had taken seven of Pollard's starters out of the lineup and the substitutes averaged less than 145 pounds per man. Knowing this, Pollard tried to cancel the game but Vanderbilt, then the best team in the South, unchivalrously refused.

But when Auburn time rolled around, Pollard was ready. Before five thou- sand spectators-until that time the largest crowd in Alabama's history--Pollard's Thin Red Line defeated the Plainsmen 10-0. Before the game, Auburn's coach filed a protest, claiming that Alabama's great tackle T. S. Sims was ineligible to play because he wasn't a student. Pollard proved him wrong and Sims bore a heavy load during the game. Pollard had secretly been practicing a radical new offense, the "Military" (or possibly "Minnesota") Shift, which had been used at his alma mater, Dartmouth, but was unknown in the South. Alabama football historian James S. Edson describes it this way: "The entire line, except the center, would take their position behind the line of scrimmage and join hands. Then, quickly, the men would return to their regular positions or to the right or left side of the line, resulting most of the time in an unbalanced line."

Stars of the game for Alabama were halfback Auxford Burks, who scored the only touchdown and kicked the only field goal, and the team's 120-pound quarterback, Emile "Chick" Hannon. Auburn coach Mike Donahue was so indignant about Pollard's perfidious Military Shift formation he threatened to cancel future games with the University and in fact, after the next season, the series was indeed canceled for the next forty-one years.

In 1907, as waves of political unrest that later erupted into the First World War echoed through Europe and the Balkans, the Thin Red Line compiled a 5-1-2 season, but the lone loss was a humiliating 54-4 drubbing by Sewanee. In the Auburn game, the Tigers came on as a 3-1 favorite but the tricky Pollard bamboozled them with yet another peculiar stunt, the "Varsity Two-Step," a variation on the Military Shift. In this razzle-dazzle formation, the center faces the backfield and the line divides itself right and left, then one side shifts crabwise with the backs following. A sportswriter of the day described it as being "dainty as the minuet." The game ended in a 6-6 tie.

Perhaps of more significance is the fact that after the Auburn game the Alabama team began to lose the moniker "Thin Red Line," and a new description was ushered in--"Crimson Tide." It seems that the field in Birmingham had become a sea of red mud and a Birmingham sportswriter coined the phrase "Crimson Tide" to describe Alabama's surging mudders offense that day. Needless to say, it stuck.

The year 1908 marked the beginning of a four-decade hiatus in the football rivalry with Auburn. It was caused in part by unseemly haggling over money. In those days the host team gave the opponents a per diem allowance for their hotel and restaurant expenses. Auburn wanted $3.50 but Bama only wanted to pay $3.00. In addition, Alabama objected to Auburn's intention to bring twenty players to Birmingham, arguing they did not need that many. There was also a dispute over referees, and by the time the whole thing was sorted out it was too late to schedule the game and nobody bothered to do it again for nearly forty years.

Alabama went 6-1-1 that year, losing only to Georgia Tech which, according to reports, "resorted to trick plays." They weren't the only ones, however. When Alabama dueled the University of Georgia that year to a 6-6 tie, they almost pulled off the game in the last moments with the following chicanery: Bama halfback Thomas Reidy, indicating a field goal attempt, got on his knees and began piling up dirt for the placement try. But when the center snapped the ball, he snapped it instead to fullback Derrill Pratt, who not only faked a kick but heaved his head-gear into the air toward the goal to further befuddle the Georgia Bulldogs. Meantime, Pratt "slipped the ball to Reidy who tore out around right end for a twenty-five yard gain." Georgia held, however, and the game ended on the sour note of a tie.

But according to witnesses, the most spectacular game of 1908 was against the Haskell Indian Institution, captained by a man called Island Eagle, whose players outweighed Bama's by twenty-five pounds per man. According to contemporary football historian James S. Edson the Indians played "with a hotheadedness and savageness that was characteristic of the race and the crowd was amazed at the spectacle of the Thin Red Line holding such giants." Alabama won it 9- 8 in the closing seconds.

In 1909 Alabama went 5-1-2 but outscored its opponents by a combined 68-17, the sole loss being a 12-6 defeat at the hands of LSU. The Crimson Tide also drubbed Tennessee 10-0 for the seventh time in eight outings in a Knoxville game marked by bad behavior. With Alabama leading in the second half, the Volunteers drove to the Bama ten but the umpire, a man named Elgin, called back the play and penalized the Vols fifteen yards for holding. The Tennessee fans viewed this with such gravity that Elgin was not only booed but after the game was chased by the crowd to the streetcar, where someone struck him on the head with a stone. Further, the mob hectored him all the way to his hotel "where he was subjected to further abuse." On Tennessee's behalf, it was noted in the Knoxville papers that a twenty-five-dollar reward had been offered for the name of Elgin's assailant.

Thus ended--for reasons clouded by time--Doc Pollard's coaching career at Alabama, not only the lengthiest so far, but the most successful as well.

In 1910--the year in which Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, and Florence Nightingale died--Guy Summer Lowman, of Springfield College, took over as head coach of Bama. He produced a dreary 4-4 season, with Alabama losing all its big games--Georgia, Georgia Tech, and Mississippi as well as Bama's eternal nemesis, Sewanee. The lone win players might have taken some comfort in was against Washington & Lee, now coached by none other than their old tormentor, Doc Pollard. Alabama beat W&L 9-0 on Thanksgiving Day in Birmingham. At the end of the season, Guy Lowman was gone and Dorset Vandeventer Graves, from the University of Missouri, was in. He was Alabama's thirteenth coach since the game began there nineteen years earlier. Hardly a tradition.

Graves, like Pollard before him, would remain at Alabama for four years during which he compiled a winning 21-12-3 record. Trouble was, most of the wins were against lesser opponents, the likes of Marion Institute, Howard, and Owington College, while the University frequently lost to big rivals such as Georgia, Georgia Tech, Mississippi State, and, of course, the ever-irritating Sewanee, which Alabama never beat during Graves's tenure.

Nevertheless, the Graves period contained some interesting times for the University and the football program, and one could argue that after nearly a quarter century of Alabama football, an old era was ending and a new, more splendid one was near at hand.

Craves was a tall, young, and startlingly handsome man who basically did things by the book. In 1912 he made the following observation about his team, a motley, ill-knit collection, lacking size and strength: "In September the squad looked light and of poor physical development. Everything was discouraging. I had not yet become familiar with the Alabama Spirit--that indescribable something which made the efforts of a light team bring seemingly impossible results."

If Graves liked to do things by the book, it was not always so with his opponents, and if he thought they would not stoop to cunning, he was wrong. A notorious example was the game with Georgia in 1912. The Crimson Tide kicked off to the Bulldogs to start the contest before a sellout crowd in Columbus. While waiting to receive, a Georgia substitute named Autry took his place at right end, just inside the sideline, dressed in white overalls and carrying a water bucket. A Georgia receiver caught the kickoff and ran to his left--away from Autry in his waterboy disguise--while Autry himself, still carrying the bucket, ran straight down the sideline, keeping away from the action. When they lined up for the first play off-scrimmage, Autry dropped the bucket and ran down the field where he caught a pass from the Georgia quarterback for a forty-five-yard gain.

Alabama vigorously denounced this deceit but the umpire ruled the play legal. News accounts say the Georgia coach himself agreed the play was unfair and offered to start the game anew but was overruled. However, in its winter meeting, the Southern Conference rules committee addressed the subject and forbade such perfidious stratagems in the future.

Other notable games that year included a 6-6 tie with Sewanee, a 6-0 victory over Tennessee, during which it became so dark in the fourth quarter the match had to be finished in the glare of automobile headlights--The University of Alabama's first "night game," and the final contest of the season, a Thanksgiving Day brawl with Mississippi State in which police had to be called onto the field to quell a dispute between the coaches.

But in 1912, the year the Titanic sank, an event overtook the University that marked a decisive stage in the history of Alabama football. This was the arrival of Dr. George Hutcheson "Mike" Denny as president of the school. Not only was Denny a great educator, he loved football and was determined to apply its virtues wherever he could to build the University into a nationally recognized institution. Denny graduated from Virginia's Hampden-Sydney College in 1896 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. During those years he observed that the immense and ever-growing popularity of football could literally put a school on the national map through press coverage. When Denny arrived in Tuscaloosa on January 1, 1912, there were four hundred students enrolled on campus. When he retired a quarter century later, there were more than five thousand, many from the Northeast who had come, in part, because of the legendary prowess of Alabama's football teams.

Denny combined a mixture of administrative vision and personal charm to raise revenues and establish various schools and colleges within the University, all the while fixing his keen and unrelenting gaze on the progress of Alabama's football program. At the time of his arrival, the squad still practiced and played on the quadrangle in front of what is now Gorgas Library, but Denny perceived a more appropriate field was in order and three years later the Crimson Tide opened its first season at Denny Field, which was then between Barnwell and Parham Halls. Denny also took a personal hand in the selection of coaches.

In 1913 the Panama Canal opened and Congress first passed the income tax, while Alabama went 6-3, outscoring its opponents 188 to 40. Twenty years earlier football legend Walter Camp had begun picking an All-American team and in 1913 tackle W.T. "Bully" Vandegraaff was selected--the University's first All-American. He was one of the three famous Vandegraaff brothers of Tuscaloosa who starred on Crimson Tide teams in those early years. To lend some idea of the Alabama "fighting spirit" Coach Graves had earlier remarked upon, in the 6-0 win against Tennessee, Bully Vandegraaff nearly lost an ear, whether from a bite or some other cause we are not told. But his opposite number in the Tennessee line, tackle Bull Bayer, had this to say about it: "His ear had a real nasty cut and it was dangling from his head, bleeding badly. He grabbed his ear and tried to yank it from his head. His teammates stopped him and the managers bandaged him. Man, was that guy a tough one. He wanted to tear off his own ear so he could keep playing."

In 1914 the storm of World War I finally burst over Europe; Alabama went 5-4 but still somehow outscored its opponents by a combined 211-64. Bama handily won its first four games but then disaster struck. The Crimson Tide's versatile quarterback, Charlie Joplin, was ruled ineligible to compete after refusing to sign a document for the Southern Conference saying he had not played professional baseball. Without Joplin's skillful passing and

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The Crimson Tide

0817310517

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