"Bear Bryant Is Dead"

As an Alabama fan, you usually hear the old refrain, "Bear Bryant is dead." The gist is that well, Bear Bryant is dead, and with him gone Alabama football is nothing special. Moreover, it also implies that we fell apart after Bryant, with us doing very little since he left, and none of the foregoing has any validity.

Let us go deeper and re-visit the past 25 years.

The departure of Bryant could not have had worse timing, and could not have been more surprising. In 1978 and 1979, we were national champions. 1980 brought another incredible year that had us contending for a national championship, and though 1981 was a bit of a down year -- as expected -- we still won 9 games, and Bryant won 315. Then came 1982. Many thought Bryant would win his seventh national championship, and early on that seemed valid. We started out 4-0, and then highly-ranked Penn State and Joe Paterno came to Legion Field. As great as that team was, they were no match for the man under the houndstooth hat. The Tide dominated Penn State day, and won by three touchdowns. After the Nittany Lion massacre, we were 5-0, #1 in both polls, and on track for yet another national championship.

And then it all fell apart. Bryant's health suddenly failed, and he struggled just to get through his day-to-day coaching activities. It showed on the field. The season crashed and burned with losses to Tennessee, LSU, Auburn, and Southern Miss. Penn State, the team that was annihilated by Alabama, went on to beat Hershel Walker and Georgia in the Sugar Bowl, and finished as national champions. Less than a month after the season ended, Bryant was dead.

Again, it couldn't have been worse timing, and it could not have been more surprising. Most were expecting another national championship, and the end result was not even imaginable.

Despite the difficult situation, however, we did quite well in the years following Bryant's death.

Ray Perkins was hired to replace Bryant (though he was not Bryant's choice), and in 1983 we went 8-4 and won the Sun Bowl. 1984 was a major disappointment, largely due to injuries (Kerry Goode), as we went 5-6, our first losing season in almost thirty years. Still, even in that year, we racked up wins over Penn State and Auburn. 1985 was a good year, with the Tide going 9-2-1 and winning arguably the best Iron Bowl ever. The season ended with a blowout win over USC in the Sun Bowl. 1986 was another good year, with the Tide winning 10 games and blowing out Washington in the Sun Bowl.

1987 saw the arrival of the Bill Curry, and it was a bit of a disappointing year. We went only 7-5 -- despite wins over Penn State, Tennessee, and LSU -- and lost a close game to Michigan in the Hall of Fame Bowl. 1988 was an improvement, going 9-3, with wins over Tennessee, Penn State, Texas A&M, and Army in the Sun Bowl. 1989 was the breakout year, as we went 10-0 before losing to Auburn in the Iron Bowl. Still, we finished 10-1, won the SEC, and lost by eight points in a close game to national champion Miami in the Sugar Bowl.

1990 marked the arrival of Gene Stallings, and despite terrible injury luck (Siran Stacey tore his ACL on the first play from scrimmage in the season opener), we still went 7-5 with wins over Tennessee, LSU, and Auburn, and an appearance (albeit a very disappointing one) in the Fiesta Bowl. 1991 saw the Tide go 11-1, win the Blockbuster Bowl, and finish in the final top five. In 1992, of course, we went undefeated and won a national championship. 1993 saw nine more wins, and a bowl win in the Gator Bowl over North Carolina. 1994 ended with a 12-1 record, the sole loss coming by one point to Florida in the SEC Championship Game, and a win over Ohio State in the Citrus Bowl. 1995 saw nine wins, and 1996 ended with another ten-win season, and a bowl win over Michigan in the Outback Bowl.

At bottom, the fourteen year stretch from 1983-1996 was pretty successful for Alabama, even considering our lofty accomplishments. In those 14 years, we had 13 winning seasons with 12 bowl appearances (would have been 13, but in 1995 we were banned from bowl play) and those 12 bowl appearances netted 9 bowl wins. Moreover, we racked up two SEC championships and one national championship, and won over 75% of our games in that 14-year stretch. We had six seasons of 10+ wins, and nine seasons of 9+ wins, and we averaged over nine wins per year. Moreover, in that stretch, we had a 7-7 record against Auburn (in arguably the greatest stretch in the history of Auburn football), a 4-2 record against Georgia, a 9-4-1 record against LSU, and an 8-5-1 record against Tennessee.

Even with Bryant gone, we did very well in the fourteen years following his departure.

It wasn't until 1997, with the hiring of Mike Dubose, that we began to struggle. Unfortunately, the Dubose hiring and the NCAA sanctions doomed us to a poor decade -- well, poor for us, anyway -- from 1997-2006, but all of that had absolutely nothing to do with Bryant. Saying that the Bryant departure was any way related to the struggles from 1997-2006 is about like saying that the Herbert Hoover presidency was related to World War II. There's just no legitimate causal link between the two occurrences.

The truth of the matter is that since the early 1920's, we have been the example of consistent high-quality performance on the football field. Hell, we had three national championships before Bryant even arrived at Alabama as a player, and we continued to do very well in the 20 years after Bryant left. Only the three years of Ears Whitworth saw the Crimson Tide struggle greatly. But after that, Bryant returned, which led 25 years of sheer and utter dominance, and even after he left we had another 14-year stretch of very good football. It's just we've had a rough-for-us ten year stretch from 1997-2006, and nothing more.

At bottom, the whole "Bear Bryant is dead" argument is patently absurd, and really only reflects upon the idiocy of whomever is making the argument.