University of Tennessee Athletics
Inside The T -- Alabama And History
October 23, 2015 | Football
By Brian Rice
UTSports.com
One of the many topics of offseason conversation for Tennessee fans is the question of who is the Volunteers' biggest rival on the football field.
The response typically depends on the age of the respondent. Fans that remember the days before the Southeastern Conference's 1992 expansion quickly answer Alabama. Fans of a younger age will usually say Florida, because the ability of each team to reach the SEC Championship Game has often rested on the outcome of that game.
As most of you know, I come down firmly on the "old school" side of most things when it comes to Tennessee football and this subject is no different.
The Alabama game is always special because it is the type of game that college football is all about. A quote attributed to General Neyland says that young men have not really played at Tennessee until they have played in their first Alabama game.
Phillip Fulmer, who saw the rivalry as a player, assistant coach and head coach said in an interview this week that when former players get together, theory record against Alabama is always a topic that is brought up. For the record, Fulmer was 3-1 against UA as a player and won seven of his first nine games against Alabama as head coach, 10-5-1 overall. The tie, Fulmer's first game against the Crimson Tide as a head coach in 1993, was later forfeited by Alabama.
But it is a rivalry that has had more meaning nationally than any other in the history of the SEC. Think that statement is hyperbole?
Since 1959, Bear Bryant's second season in Tuscaloosa, the teams have been unranked just three times in the annual series, 1965, 1984 and 2000. Of those unranked meetings, the teams would finish the season that way only once, in 1984.
In 1965, Tennessee finished ranked No. 7 and Alabama won the national championship. In 2000, the Crimson Tide started the season ranked No. 3, but stumbled out of the gate. Tennessee started slow as well, but built on a 20-10 win over Alabama to finish 25th in the final Associated Press poll.
With Alabama entering Saturday's 98th meeting with a No. 8 ranking in the AP poll, it will mark the 41st time in the last 56 meetings that one team has been ranked in the top 10 at the time of the game. Six times, 1967, 1972, 1973, 1989, 1996 and 1999, both teams have carried top-10 rankings into the game.
It is a series with great coaches as well. General Robert Neyland was 12-5-2 against Alabama. He restarted a series in 1928 that had been dormant since a 17-7 Tennessee victory in 1914. Neyland won his first game against the Tide, 15-13, in Tuscaloosa, and his last, 20-0, in Knoxville in 1952.
Bryant ended his career with a winning record against Tennessee at Alabama, 16-7-2, though he was 1-5-2 against the Vols at previous stops at Kentucky and Texas A&M, and never beat Neyland. He lost his first game in the series, 14-7 to Bowden Wyatt's team in Knoxville in 1958, and his last, a 35-28 setback for his second-ranked squad to John Majors in 1982.
What does Saturday hold for the next chapter in the rivalry? That remains to be seen. But it will be a memory made, a page in the book of a game that means so much to so many.
Brian Rice is the writer for UTSports.com. You can contact him after the run through the T on Twitter @briancrice or by email at UTSportsMailbag@gmail.com.
