Football
University of Alabama law student William G. Little learned how to play American football while attending school in Andover, Massachusetts and began teaching the sport to fellow Alabama students in early 1892. Later in the year, the school formed an official team of 19 players, with Little as captain and E. B. Beaumont as head coach. Early newspaper accounts of Alabama football simply listed the team as the "varsity" or the "Crimson White" after the school colors. Headline writers then made popular the nickname "The Thin Red Line". It was not until 1907 that the name "Crimson Tide" was used to describe Alabama. The name was supposedly first used by Hugh Roberts, former sports editor of the Birmingham Age-Herald. Roberts coined the nickname to describe the 1907 Alabama-Auburn game, played in a sea of mud. Although Auburn was favored to win, Alabama played well in the red mud and held Auburn to a 6-6 tie.
Since then, the program has won 23 Southeastern Conference (SEC) championships and accepted 14 national championships. In addition to the championships claimed by the university, Alabama has been recognized by the NCAA as National Champions for the 1945, 1962, 1966, 1967, and 1977 college football seasons. However, those championships are not claimed by Alabama. On January 9, 2012, Alabama finished the season ranked #2 and beat #1 LSU 21-0 in the BCS Championship game to take the BCS national title. Although the NCAA only lists the Crimson Tide as having 12 national championships, the claim of 14 includes six championships from the the period before 1950 that were retroactively claimed by Alabama.
The team has also made 58 bowl appearances throughout their history (an NCAA record), beginning with the 1926 Rose Bowl to, the most recent, the 2012 BCS National Championship Game. In those bowls, Alabama has a 33–22–3 record. Since 1913, Alabama has 98 first team All-Americans, 29 consensus. In 2009, Alabama also recorded their first Heisman Trophy winner, Mark Ingram, in the closest Heisman Trophy race.
Read more about this topic: Alabama Crimson Tide
Famous quotes containing the word football:
“In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty’s torch. In football you run over somebody’s face.”
—Donald Hall (b. 1928)
“... in the minds of search committees there is the lingering question: Can she manage the football coach?”
—Donna E. Shalala (b. 1941)
“...I’m not money hungry.... People who are rich want to be richer, but what’s the difference? You can’t take it with you. The toys get different, that’s all. The rich guys buy a football team, the poor guys buy a football. It’s all relative.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)