The historic Alabama-USC 1970 matchup that changed football in the South
It didn’t result in a victory on the football field, but it just may have been the greatest triumph in Alabama’s storied football history.
The Crimson Tide open the 2016 season with the USC Trojans. The teams meet in exactly three weeks at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. It’s a renewal of a short but meaningful series highlighted by that infamous clash in 1970 at Legion Field in Birmingham.
It was a game that inspired books and documentaries to be produced, chronicling and speculating its significance in the destiny of the South and Southern football. It is remembered still today to be one of the most important football games ever played.
“We are excited to participate in a game that is such an attractive matchup for the nation’s fans,” said then-first-year USC head football coach Steve Sarkisian in 2014. “The 2016 Cowboys Classic not only brings together two of college football’s most tradition-laden and successful programs, but teams that in 1970 played a significant role in shaping the history of the game.”
Showtime ran a documentary called “Against the Tide” and its official synopsis says it all:
“The documentary paints a vivid picture of the turbulent state of Southern culture during the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle for integration. Did University of Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant and University of Southern California coach John McKay purposefully schedule the first game of the 1970 season – the first time a fully integrated team had played in Alabama – as a statement against segregation?
“Or was it simply another game between two college football powerhouses whose coaches were close personal friends? What were Bryant’s and McKay’s motives for the last-minute addition of USC, a fully integrated team ranked by some as the No. 1 team in the country, to the 1970 Alabama schedule?
“Against the Tide” examines the role college football played in changing the outlook on segregation.”
A book titled: “One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed a Nation” can be purchased on Amazon.com. Its description is very similar:
“In sweltering heat of September of 1970, the USC Trojans and the University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide played a game that defined the emancipation of the South from its sordid history of racial segregation. When USC’s black running back Sam “The Bam” Cunningham ran roughshod all over the all-white Crimson Tide, more than a football game was won.”
Bryant had already won three national titles at Alabama, but the trophies were becoming to show some tarnish by the time the Tide completed a 6-5 season, his worst, in 1969.
Cunningham and the Trojans marched into Alabama and opened some eyes. USC rolled up 559 yards of offense, Cunningham accounted for 135 of those and 2 touchdowns on just 12 carries, and USC ran away with a 42-21 triumph.
It was the Trojans’ first-ever victory over Alabama in three tries, and the ramifications can still be felt today.
The Tide stumbled through the remainder of the 1970 schedule but began integration the following year, and with its wishbone offense, went to the Los Angeles Coliseum and upset the Trojans, 17-10, en route to an undefeated regular season.
Bryant would go on to win three more national championships at Alabama.