Alabama football defined the South 100 years ago in the Rose Bowl
By David Wasson
Published:
Far too often, history disappears into the haze of generations lost and faded ink on yellowed paper. Tales get passed down, sure, from ages gone by. But mostly we just forget.
That’s how history works.
Alabama hasn’t always been great at football, and in fact has spent several decades decidedly pedestrian at the sports. Recent Crimson Tide bandwagon fans can’t imagine a time when the Saban Death Star didn’t assimilate the sport to its whim, just as Coach Bryant-era fans conveniently forget the imminently forgettable Ears Whitworth-era debacles.
But well before Saban and Bryant, and Stallings and Drew and Thomas too, there was Wallace Wade – the original Alabama icon and the coach pretty much responsible for priming the ground all Crimson Tide victories have swelled up from in the past 100 years.
Back in 1925, football in the South was more novelty than serious competition. The Southeastern Conference itself was still 7 years away from formation, so teams like Alabama were members of the 22-team Southern Conference along with future SEC programs like Auburn, Florida, Kentucky, LSU, Mississippi, South Carolina, Mississippi State and Tennessee.
Remember, now, the United States itself was still 48 states strong in 1925, and the union was still 4 years away from the Great Depression. The Scopes “Monkey” Trial was that year, as was the start of the Grand Ole Opry as well as the first television transmissions.
College football, well, it was a sport much more established and reputed everywhere but the South in 1925. Knute Rockne had Notre Dame rolling and was just starting to popularize the forward pass, while USC and California were dominating on the Pacific Coast and Princeton and Harvard were the traditional Eastern powers.
Southern football? It was still too new and too soft. No team from the South dared to compete with the rest of the country.
Alabama was coached in 1925 by Wallace Wade, his first head coaching job after starting as an assistant at Vanderbilt. Wade was 33 years old during the 1925 season and was coaching an Alabama team that was also 33 years in existence but had only been called the Crimson Tide for 18 years to that point.
The Tide was beyond great in 1925 under Wade, allowing only 7 points and recording 8 shutouts in a 9-0 regular season – with only Birmingham-Southern getting into the end zone in the third quarter of a 50-7 victory. Playing 7 home games certainly helped, though “home” for Alabama was either the 7,000-seat Denny Field in Tuscaloosa, Rickwood Field in Birmingham or the Cramton Bowl in Montgomery.
Johnny Mack Brown was Alabama’s first true star, as “The Dothan Antelope” would earn All-Southern honors in 1925. Allison “Pooley” Hubert was also a dominant force as a fullback and quarterback, and Wade would later call him “undoubtedly one of the greatest football players of all time.” Together they would be the nucleus of an offense that scored 34.6 points per game and drew the attention of football followers beyond the Southern border.
Wade and Alabama thought its season was over after defeating Georgia (some things never change…) for a second consecutive Southern Conference title at Rickwood Field. But that 27-0 victory, combined with a tie between Colgate and Brown, earned Alabama a surprise invitation to the Rose Bowl to take on the 10-0-1 Washington Huskies.
Remember, now, the Wright Brothers had invented the airplane just 22 years prior, and commercial air travel wasn’t common until the post-World War II era. And no southern team had ever been invited to compete in what was then the sport’s only bowl game. Not to mention even getting to California was a grand exercise – though Wade happily loaded up the Crimson Tide on a sleeper car and hit the rail.
The trip to Pasadena took about a week, but it didn’t immediately look like a sound journey when Alabama laced them up against Washington at the Rose Bowl on Jan. 1, 1926. Huskies star tailback George Wilson intercepted a pass early that led to a 63-yard scoring drive, and Wilson then threw a 22-yard pass for a 12-0 lead.
But Wade turned to Hubert more in the second half, and with Wilson out due to sore ribs, Alabama was primed to strike back. Hubert scored on a 1-yard plunge, Grant Gillis hit Brown on a 59-yard TD pass and, following a Washington fumble, Hubert hit Brown for another touchdown pass on the very next play to give the Tide 3 touchdowns in 7 minutes of clock time. Wilson returned to throw a late touchdown pass, but Washington’s pair of missed extra-point kicks were the difference.
Final score: Alabama 20, Washington 19.
The 1925 season was Alabama’s first true perfect season in school history (the Tide went 1-0 in 1897). The Crimson Tide loaded back onto the sleeper car to head back east not only with the Rose Bowl trophy but with the proof that Southern football was just as strong as the sport’s best anywhere else in the country.
Quite simply, it was “the game that changed the South.”
Brown was named Rose Bowl MVP, and both Brown and Hubert eventually earned induction to the College Football Hall of Fame. Brown capitalized on his Rose Bowl fame by signing a motion picture contract with MGM and soon embarked on a 40-year career as an actor.
Alabama itself was retroactively named national champions by William Boand, Richard Billingsley, and the one-man Helms Athletic Foundation. The NCAA cites Michigan, Dartmouth and Alabama all as 1925 national champions. And the 1925 team began a 4-year run that added national titles in 1926 and 1930 before Wade moved on to coach at Duke that was so successful the Blue Devils still play in Wallace Wade Stadium to this day.
And now? Alabama counts 18 national championships and 34 conference crowns (4 in the Southern Conference and 30 more in the SEC). And after every victory these days, Tide fans belt out “Yea Alabama”, the school’s fight song that was written in 1926 and includes the phrase “Remember the Rose Bowl, we’ll win then.”
The rich history of Crimson Tide football officially began 133 years ago, but in reality it was born precisely 100 years prior to the 2026 Rose Bowl – when Alabama disembarks from an airplane this time instead of a train in Pasadena to take on Indiana in the Grandaddy Of Them All.
An APSE national award-winning writer and editor, David Wasson has almost four decades of experience in the print journalism business in Florida and Alabama. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and several national magazines and websites. He also hosts Gulfshore Sports with David Wasson, weekdays from 3-5 pm across Southwest Florida and on FoxSportsFM.com. His Twitter handle: @JustDWasson.
