Badgers beat Crimson Tide 15-0 on Nov. 3, 1928
Wallace Wade, Alabama's football coach from 1923-30. He won three national championships with the Crimson Tide. Alabama and Wisconsin will meet on the football field on Saturday for the first time in nearly every living person’s memory.
America was still a year away from the stock market crash that precipitated the Great Depression, and 13 years from entering World War II. Paul “Bear” Bryant was a 15-year-old living in Moro Bottom, Arkansas.Alabama had emerged as a national football power by 1928, with coach Wallace Wade having taken his team to back-to-back Rose Bowls at the end of the 1925 and 1926 seasons.
Alabama slipped a bit to 5-4-1 in 1927, while Wisconsin posted a 4-4 record in Thistlethwaite’s debut season. But that did little to dampen the enthusiasm for the Crimson Tide’s showdown with the Badgers the following season. Alabama began the 1928 season at 3-1, with wins over Southern Conference rivals Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Sewanee. The lone blemish was a 15-13 loss to a Tennessee team that would eventually finish 9-0-1.
“Alabama’s starting line from tackle to tackle will outweigh Wisconsin 12 pounds per man while the two backfields are about evenly matched from a standpoint of speed and weight,” Newman wrote. “The Badger backfield has it on Alabama in that all of the Wisconsin backs can pass. … The Badgers have a rangy, fairly fast team, very good on following the ball and medium good ends.”
“Wisconsin will send against Alabama what is said to the greatest team to represent the great university, which ranks third in enrollment, in 12 years,” he wrote. “It is estimated that 38,000 will see the Southerners and Yankees clash. Nothing short of a miniature civil war will please the patrons. And if the Badgers are in the same mood as the Crimsons, a little civil war it will be.”The game itself was fairly competitive, if not a four-year battle to the death.
Wade’s plan to outfit his team for the conditions didn’t come to fruition, as local stores were sold out of gloves. Used to playing in cold weather, the Wisconsin players were dressed in heavy wool jerseys, with stockings, mufflers and gloves. “Wisconsin hammered the Crimson Tide of Alabama into wavelets and ripples here Saturday, and behind the flying feet of Bo Cuisinier, Harold Smith, Bill Lusby, Sammy Behr, Ken Bartholemew and Neil Hays, speedy and battering backs, the Badgers rolled up another victory, that send Alabama back to Dixie, just another team that tried to halt Wisconsin’s progress,” sports editor Hank Casserly wrote.
“My players just lacked the experience to cope with Wisconsin players and I feel happy over the boys holding the score to 15 points. Lack of experience cost us a touchdown, but a coach can’t expect to develop a field general in two weeks. Alabama just simply wasn’t entitled to beat Wisconsin.” Wisconsin fell off to 4-5 in 1929 and wouldn’t again contend for the Big Ten championship until the early 1940s. Their next conference title came in 1952, when Ivan Williamson’s Badgers lost 7-0 to USC in the Rose Bowl.
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