🏈 Football Study Hall: A look at '25--Bama vs Washington Rose Bowl.

[TerryP]

Wallace Wade’s 1925 Crimson Tide: one of the 50 best* of all time

1925: Alabama 20, Washington 19

By 1925, the Rose Bowl had become college football’s showcase game. It was designed to pit an eastern team against a western team, in a gorgeous locale, in a de facto national title game. It conveyed status. It also hadn’t yet invited a team from the South. [...]

Technically, the Rose Bowl’s streak of non-invitation should have continued in 1925. Undefeated Dartmouth was offered a bid, but school officials turned the invitation down in mid-November. The school was not prone to accepting such bids anyway, but in this case snowfall in New Hampshire was so significant that the school feared the team wouldn’t get adequate practice time in to do the game justice.

Depending on who you believe, Colgate either turned down an invitation as well or got eliminated when it finished the season with a tie against a bad Brown team. Tulane, Princeton, Illinois, Michigan, and Yale were all supposedly approached as well.

Eventually, by either choice or the lack of any other options, the Rose Bowl invited a dominant, unbeaten Alabama squad. And for the second straight year, the Rose Bowl and its result changed the trajectory of the sport’s history, despite itself.

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[TerryP]

@Bobby Kunz This is one of the SBNation sites I believe sets their network apart. I like this writers content.

 

[Bobby Kunz]

@Bobby Kunz This is one of the SBNation sites I believe sets their network apart. I like this writers content.

Yep, this is Bill Connelly. One of the best writers over at SBN.