As most college football fans are well aware, the Alabama Crimson Tide have a rich history in the sport, claiming 18 national championships, including six under head coach Nick Saban.
If you’re a college football fan, you also probably know Alabama’s mascot is an elephant, and… what does that have to do with Crimson Tide?
The answer, according to Alabama’s athletics site, dates back to a sportswriter during the 1930 season — one of the Crimson Tide’s national title years — when the team was coached by Wallace Wade.
After watching the Alabama-Ole Miss game that season in Tuscaloosa, Atlanta Journal sportswriter Everett Strupper noted the incredible size of the Crimson Tide, writing that it looked like “they had nearly doubled in size” compared with the previous season. He heard them compared to elephants and described the scene.
Strupper wrote, via RollTide.com:
“That Alabama team of 1930 is a typical Wade machine, powerful, big, tough, fast, aggressive, well-schooled in fundamentals, and the best blocking team for this early in the season that I have ever seen. When those big brutes hit you I mean you go down and stay down, often for an additional two minutes.
“Coach Wade started his second team that was plenty big and they went right to their knitting scoring a touchdown in the first quarter against one of the best fighting small lines that I have seen. For Ole Miss was truly battling the big boys for every inch of ground.
“At the end of the quarter, the earth started to tremble, there was a distant rumble that continued to grow. Some excited fan in the stands bellowed, ‘Hold your horses, the elephants are coming,’ and out stamped this Alabama varsity.
“It was the first time that I had seen it and the size of the entire eleven nearly knocked me cold, men that I had seen play last year looking like they had nearly doubled in size.”
The Crimson Tide linemen were referred to as “red elephants” because of their size and uniforms.
And, as Yahoo Sports noted in 2012, elephants became a big part of game days. But the elephant wasn’t recognized by the school as the official mascot until the late 1970s. More from Yahoo Sports:
“Coach (Bear) Bryant thought it was not representative of football players,” [director of the Paul W. Bryant Museum Ken] Gaddy said. “He thought that elephants were big, slow and clumsy. That was not the image of his players he wanted to portray.”
Bryant was Alabama’s football coach and athletic director, not to mention a legendary figure that Crimson Tide fans would never cross. When Bryant shot down the elephant mascot idea, that was that. But the same students that worshipped the Bear persisted, and he finally relented in the late 1970s.
Now known as Big Al, the elephant mascot made its debut at the 1979 Sugar Bowl, and he’s been around ever since.
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