MIAMI — At a time when college football was generally considered the domain of eastern blue bloods, Notre Dame and Alabama were upstart teams that gave blue collar fans a chance to tweak the elite.
About 90 years later, the Fighting Irish and Crimson Tide are the elite — two of college football’s signature programs, set to play for a national championship next Monday in Miami that could break records for television viewership.
No. 2 Alabama vs. No. 1 Notre Dame. Even casual sports fans understand this is a college football classic.
“I think it’s basically because they’ve won more national championships than anybody else, and they’ve been doing it since the ’20s,” said Dan Jenkins, an award-winning sportswriter and author who is also the historian for the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame. “Plus they’ve had a bunch of gods coaching them — Rockne, Leahy, Ara in South Bend, and Wallace Wade, Bear Bryant, and now Saban at Alabama.”
He’s right. And to understand just how Notre Dame and Alabama became touchstones for their uniquely American sport, you have to look back to the 1920s, when beating an Ivy League team was a huge deal and there was nothing bigger than playing in the Rose Bowl.
“Up to that point college football was important, but only in the fall,” said Murray Sperber, a professor at the University of California in Berkeley, who has written two books about the history of Notre Dame football.
“The fans tended to be only alumni of the schools and local middle class people,” Sperber said. “And that was true of Notre Dame before (Knute) Rockne became coach.”
Knute Rockne was a Norwegian-born former end for Notre Dame, who helped his school to a head-turning upset of Army as a player and then took over as coach in 1918. He was media savvy, and intent on turning the football program into a national power. Part of his strategy: turning recent immigrants to the States, many of them Catholic, into Notre Dame fans.
“They had trouble getting opponents, in part because of the anti-Catholicism of the Midwest,” Sperber said.
In 1923 — an era so long ago the nickname “Ramblers” competed with fan favorite “Fighting Irish” in press reports — Notre Dame won two landmark victories that helped cement its place as America’s team.
First, it beat Army, 13-0, at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn as its rivalry with the Cadets blossomed into one of the fiercest in sports. The next week, the Fighting Irish won at Princeton, 25-2.
Notre Dame was the college football team for the people who didn’t go to college. Rockne became an American hero, with his “Win One For the Gipper” speech (to inspire a 1928 victory over, you guessed it, Army). His death in a 1931 plane crash in Kansas was a national tragedy, prompting statements of sympathy from President Herbert Hoover and the king of Norway.
Yet for all the mythology and folklore around Notre Dame football, the biggest reason for its popularity was quite basic.
“An absolutely crucial element is winning,” Sperber said.
Few programs have won like Notre Dame. Alabama is one of them.
The Tide made a similar breakthrough in the 1920s under coach Wallace Wade. The Tide’s big victory against the Ivy League came in 1922 against Penn.
“Back in those days, Alabama beating Penn was as surprising as if Penn were to beat Alabama today,” said Kirk McNair, who worked as sports information director for Alabama during the 1970s and now runs ’Bama Magazine.
“It started to put southern football on the map,” he said.
Trips to the Rose Bowl marked the next step for both schools.
The Fighting Irish went to the Rose Bowl in 1925 to play Stanford. The team traveled by train and, as Sperber said, “at every stop there is a public parade.”
Notre Dame beat Pop Warner’s Stanford team, 27-10, and the trip from South Bend was “like a pilgrimage there and back,” Sperber said.
Alabama won the 1926 Rose Bowl, 20-19, over the Washington Huskies, went back to California in 1927 and tied Stanford, 7-7. The Tide then won three more Rose Bowls from 1931-46, losing one.
When Wade left Alabama, he was replaced by Frank Thomas, a former Notre Dame quarterback who played for Rockne. “That was pretty big to get a guy from Notre Dame even then,” McNair said.
Alabama hit hard times in the mid-1950s, but fixed its problems by bringing home one of its own.
Bear Bryant played for Thomas in the 1930s and became a coaching star at Kentucky and Texas A&M. Under the Bear, Alabama dominated the Southeastern Conference and won six national championships between 1961-79.
But he never beat Notre Dame in four tries. Former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz said that always stuck with Bryant, recounting a conversation he had with the late Hall of Fame coach when Bryant retired.
“He said, ‘Aww, Coach, I’ll be the guy that goes down as the guy that couldn’t beat Notre Dame,’ ” Holtz said. “He wanted to beat Notre Dame so bad and he could never do it.”
The Fighting Irish playing against the Crimson Tide — it’s a marquee matchup in any era.
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