How Bear Bryant and the 1966 Alabama Crimson Tide Were Denied College Football’s Most Elusive Prize

By Keith Dunnavant

It was the hateful voices, because the children who invariably showed up to tease him about being poor had the power to make him feel inferior.

“Paul never forgot how that felt,” said his sister, Louis.

Truly understanding the powerful 1966 football team is impossible without first examining and comprehending the life of the man who shaped it. Paul Bryant was not the greatest college football coach of all time just because he knew how to skillfully manipulate Xs and Os. His success was much more deeply connected to his mysterious ability to manipulate – and inspire – all kinds of players to reach.

Bryant spent his whole life running from those hateful voices, but the feelings of inferiority and hopelessness they spurred made him strong, not weak.

… When a huckster came to Fordyce and offered the princely sum of one dollar to anyone brave enough to wrestle a black bear, young Paul, big, strong, and reckless, jumped at the chance. Not just to make a buck, although the chance to earn a nice payday was a significant motivator for a poor boy who gladly worked all day chopping cotton to make fifty cents. The experience with the bear was not just some ill-advised adolescent stunt that earned him a nickname. It was a window into his soul. Then as later, the need to prove something – to others as well as to himself – was a powerful force in Bryant’s life. In time, it would motivate him to push so hard against the boundaries of his own potential that no one could ever again have the ability to make him feel small.

… The man who once played the game of his life against Tennessee with a broken leg – yet always toiled in the shadow of the more graceful Don Hutson, destined to become one of the greatest receivers in the history of the National Football League – saw football as a metaphor for the human experience. In Bryant’s Darwinist world, only the fittest survived, and the fittest were not always the most gifted athletes. In fact, he probably ran off more great talents than any coach in the history of the game because they refused to bend to his powerful will. Conversely, he loved overachievers who were not very gifted and didn’t know it. The survivors of his rigorous physical and mental training always knew how to fight for every last ounce of potential, and if they got knocked down, they always got up.

(Dunnavant 2006, 9-10)

All the additional money from tickets, TV, bowl games, and such allowed programs like Alabama’s to award large numbers of scholarships. It would be a decade before the National Collegiate Athletic Association ventured into the dipped a toe into that water in the late 1960s. Alabama routinely signed sixty or more players per year. The ability to bring in so many athletes gave Bryant the luxury of taking chances and also afforded him the opportunity to lock up some players just to keep them from signing with a rival program, especially Auburn.

(Dunnavant 2006, 16)

When Chatwood packed his bags for Tuscaloosa, his daddy, a wholesale grocery salesman who never attended college, stopped him at the door. “Son, I’m breaking your plate,” he said with a serious expression.

“I didn’t need a translation,” Chatwood recalled. “He meant that I had made a commitment to Alabama and Coach Bryant, that I was a man now, and that I better honor my commitment and go out and make a life for myself. I didn’t have a home to come back to if I decided to quit, and I knew that even before he said it.”

The image of the broken plate resonated across the entire team. One way or another, every man who signed with the Crimson Tide was negotiating a passage from childhood to adulthood, from dependence to independence, understanding that he was entering a world of enormous expectations with no real safety net, a Technicolor jungle where everyone he knew – and many he did not – would be counting on him, and, in no small measure, living vicariously through his adventures. The elder Chatwood was not being mean to his son; he was not banishing David from his life. Rather, he was demonstrating, with a memorable and easy to understand symbol of tough love, that he was not about to make it easy on him to view his commitment to Alabama frivolously by offering him a refuge from the moments of doubt and weakness surely to come.

In the land beyond mama’s kitchen table, all plates had to be earned.

(Dunnavant 2006, 19)

The elder members of the 1966 Alabama Crimson Tide were the last athletes recruited to play the one-platoon game in Tuscaloosa, and in the respect, they became the personification of a dying breed, soon to be as anachronistic as singing cowboys, soon to join blacksmiths, soda jerks, and service station attendants in the graveyard of American cultural extinction.

… After several years of rigorous debate, the college football rules committee completely liberalized the substitution guidelines prior to the 1964 season, allowing coaches to bring players on and off the field as they pleased. The change ushered in the era of two-platoon football for good, a shift destined to fundamentally alter the sport, and Bryant was not the least bit happy about it.

Although Alabama was better equipped than most programs to handle the change, considering the massive number of solid athletes it attracted and the unsurpassed level of training they received, the Bear resisted the two-platoon game because he understood that it de-emphasized stamina and versatility in favor of skill and fresh legs. It promoted the development of a whole different sort of player, and his philosophy of small, quick athletes who won by outlasting the other guy was living on borrowed time. The future belonged to big, strong men pumped up in the weight room, specialists who would not need to worry about enduring for sixty minutes.

(Dunnavant 2006, 52-53)

Calling his own number, Namath lunged forward behind center Gaylon McCullough and disappointed into a sea of red and white jerseys around the goal line, colliding with a defensive wall led by All-America linebacker Tommy Nobis, a dominating player who would win both the Maxwell and Outland trophies the next season. Namath and his nearby teammates believed he had scored when they all climbed off the grass, a view momentarily vindicated by one official who raised his arms to signal a touchdown. However, he was quickly overruled by another official, the ball went over on downs, and Texas ran out the clock to secure a 21-17 victory.

Like McCollough and Bowman, Namath later publicly insisted that he had crossed the goal line, but Bryant refused to second-guess the officiating. In fact, the way he handled the situation taught every man on the team yet another lesson, especially those athletes still being forged in the crucible of the Alabama football experience for future assaults on glory.

“We didn’t deserve to win after failing in four cracks from the six,” Bryant told reporters afterword. “When something means that much to you, you should push people out of there far enough to remove all doubt.”

Instead of pouting or causing a stink, Bryant was telling his players that in football as in life, they should be prepared to do whatever is required to win convincingly enough to prevent one debatable call from determining the outcome.

(Dunnavant 2006, 56)

However, for the reasons of practicality in a state with an enormously popular segregationist governor who controlled the funding for his institution and a large number of fans who needed to have their hearts and minds changed on issues of race before they would be willing to accept black faces in red jerseys, Bryant refused to spend some of his own political capital by integrating his team. He told friends it was too soon, too dangerous to place an African-American player in such a volatile and potentially hostile environment, and he may have been right, but his caution played into the hands of the forces who wanted to equate him with George Wallace.

(Dunnavant 2006, 82)

Like the overall society, the Alabama football team’s reliance on a strict set of boundaries went unchallenged at least partially because resisting authority remained anathema to the whole culture. “Why?” was a question being asked with increasing frequency in places like California, where hippies and those pursuing alternative lifestyles were fast becoming a force, but not in Alabama, not in the vast majority of the heartland. One of the reasons Bryant’s all-consuming philosophy worked was because the world sent him sons who were already conditioned to respect his jurisdiction over their lives, because the term generation gap had precious little currency, at least in Alabama.

(Dunnavant 2006, 104)

…becoming a champion has always been and will forever be the act of persevering and triumphing in the face of a season-long minefield of conflict and risk. Becoming a champion is about taking the field and proving something. At the core, it is the very American act of earning something that cannot be bestowed. Becoming a champion is not and will never be about cowering in fear and taking the path of least resistance.

Without the possibility of losing, what good is winning?

(Dunnavant 2006, 221)

It is possible to look back on the continued segregation of the Alabama team in disapproval, even shame, and still see the unfairness of a system that bastardized a sport supposedly based on merit by allowing some unknown number of voters to punish the Crimson Tide because it was all-white. If the reverse had been true, and Alabama had fielded an all-black team, such behavior would have been every hit as bigoted. Segregation was just plain wrong, and yet so was allowing any consideration of skin color to affect the awarding of college football’s national championship. In this respect, anyone who sought to rank a truly deserving Alabama team lower simply because it was segregated was no better than George Wallace or Bull Connor.

(Dunnavant 2006, 224)

As officials prepared to flip the coin, Cecil Dowdy and Johhny Mosley could be seen throwing blades of grass into the air, testing the wind. Clearly, the direction of the breeze had changed since Bryan instructed them to “kick to the clock,” and in the tense moment after Alabama won the toss, Dowdy and Mosely could not agree on a course of action. Should they follow the boss’s orders, even though the conditions had changes? Or should they adapt to the new wind?

“I wanted to go the other way, because I thought that’s what Coach Bryant would want to do, under the circumstances,” recalled Mosley. “But ole Cecil wanted to do what Coach Bryant told us to do, period.”

Finally, Dowdy blurted out, “Kick to the clock.”

In many ways, playing football for Paul Bryant was like being in the military. The coach expected his orders to be followed, and ordinarily, this was not the least bit problematic. To every last man on the team, his word was law. 

However, Bryant also expected his leaders on the field to act like leaders, which sometimes required them to know how and when to improvise. The line was fine and fraught with peril, and the pregame debate between the two captains was a perfect example of how two driven, disciplined, well-coached athletes could reach completely opposite conclusions when forced to make a decision in the heat of the moment.

(Dunnavant 2006, 230)

… From an early age, children in the Heart of Dixie made a choice – Alabama or Auburn – and the decision tended to brand them for life. Like other agricultural schools – including Texas A&M, Mississippi State, and Oklahoma State – Auburn was looked down upon by the supporters of the state university as a “cow college.” While Alabama produced most of the state’s doctors, lawyers, bankers, and such, Auburn was known primarily for turning out pharmacists, engineers, and county extension agents. Whom you pulled for said much about your lot in life. Alabama fans enjoyed stereotyping Auburn fans as hicks with inferiority complexes – and chips firmly attached to their shoulders. Auburn fans derided Alabama fans as elitist, arrogant snobs. 

Alabama graduates dominated the legislature, and whenever anyone across the state ran for mayor or seat on a city council or school board, his university affiliation was always an asset or a liability, depending upon the demographic makeup of his constituency.

(Dunnavant 2006, 241)

The sport has seen many controversial finishes close calls through the years, but the 1966 Alabama Crimson Tide occupies a dubious distinction.

In the history of college football, no other team has ever won back-to-back national championships, finished undefeated and untied in the third year, and been denied the title.

In the history of college football, no other team has ever been ranked No. 1 in the preseason AP poll, finished perfect, and then been denied the title.

In 1966, the pollsters appeared to be saying that winning was irrelevant, or at least not the decisive factor, in the national championship process, effectively moving the goalposts even as Alabama chased history. Not only was this an insult to an Alabama team that took on all comers, it undermined faith in the process, and no one in 1966 could predict how the inequities in the polling system would be challenged in the years ahead.

(Dunnavant 2006, 250)

John Mitchell, the first African American to start for the Crimson Tide, offered a powerful statement about the future of Alabama football by making the tackle on the opening kickoff. As a senior in 1972, Mitchell was recognized as Alabama’s first All-American with a black face. By 1973, about one-third of the team’s starters were African Americans, including Wilbur Jackson, an All-SEC selection who led the team’s powerful wishbone offense in rushing. Not that the boss ever spent any time thinking about arbitrarily influencing the number. He believed in merit, period, and once the door opened, the Alabama football team became a model of racial integration and harmony.

During the period, a reporter from out of state asked Bryant how many black players he had on his team. “I don’t have any black players,” he said.

The man asked Bryant how many white players he had. “I don’t have any white players, either,” he said. “I only have football players.”

(Dunnavant 2006, 283)

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References

Dunnavant, Keith. 2006. The Missing Ring: How Bear Bryant and the 1966 Alabama Crimson Tide Were Denied College Football’s Most Elusive Prize. N.p.: St. Martin’s Press.

ISBN 0-312-33683-7