How Alabama’s victory in the 1926 Rose Bowl paved the way for Southern football dominance

There was a time when the nation regarded football in Alabama — in all of the South, really — as unworthy of notice, much less respect. Eastern legacy colleges, monstrous Midwest institutions, growing Pacific coast universities had mastered this new sport of football, the unholy offspring of soccer, rugby and a street fight. The South? The South was too busy trying to climb out of a post-Civil War hole to focus on anything as frivolous as football. The condescending verdict on the South: like war, industry, race relations and education, football was just one more province where the South fell short.

Then came the 1926 Rose Bowl, and nothing about college football in the South — or anywhere else in the country — would ever be the same again.

Every college football game carries symbolic and narrative weight, and some even rise to the level of epics. Think, say, the old Notre Dame-Miami “Catholics vs. Convicts” battle — the players aren’t just representing their schools, they’re easy stand-ins for an entire worldview.

But few college football games have borne the weight of an entire region the way the 1926 Rose Bowl did. The Civil War still lived on in the memory of older Southerners, and the stories of the war — undoubtedly embellished and sanitized to present a very specific image of Southern history — were part of the region’s everyday vernacular and self-image. Beyond that, though, the South labored under the weight of its own irrelevance and disrespect — some self-inflicted, some perpetuated by the rest of the nation — and any chance to claw back a little self-esteem was a welcome one.

Pregame: The boys from ‘Tusca-loser’

The NCAA recognizes college football champions dating all the way back to 1869. Most Southern schools began playing in the late 1890s — Alabama’s program started…

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Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2023-12-26 17:27:20

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