Alabama Fans Glad to See Tide Coming In

Alabama football fans, accustomed to national titles and 25 straight bowl trips, couldn’t believe it.

An 0-2 start, then 1-4 and finally 5-6. The first losing season since 1957, the year before Bear Bryant rejuvenated the program. And an end to that streak of 25 consecutive bowl appearances, longest ever in college football.

The fans were getting impatient with Ray Perkins, who succeeded Bryant shortly before Bryant died in 1983. Perkins’ first season at Alabama, where he was an end on national championship teams in 1964 and 1965, went 8-4, including a 28-7 smacking of Southern Methodist in the Sun Bowl.

Alabama salvaged some satisfaction last year with a 17-15 season-ending victory over archrival and favored Auburn.

Now, the Crimson Tide is off to a 4-0 start and has a six-game winning streak. It began with a 29-7 victory over Cincinnati before the 1984 Auburn game and continued this season with decisions over Georgia, Texas A&M;, Cincinnati and Vanderbilt.

The 1984 victory over Cincinnati, Perkins said, “turned the corner.” Alabama had lost the previous week to Louisiana State.

“That totally cut the strings, if I might say so, of the past era,” said Perkins. “That constituted the first losing season in 27 years. That would be before Coach Bryant came back down here. So that just cut us loose from it.”

He said he told his players after the LSU loss that it was “time we started looking toward starting a new era, our era. I told them, ‘We’ll win these last two and get it started.’ ”

Quarterback Mike Shula remembered that Perkins told the team “that we had a chance to build something for ourselves, so actually the Cincinnati game was a high point for us. It was our chance.”

This season’s opening game against Georgia gave Alabama something it had not enjoyed in a long time, a come-from-behind victory. The Tide had dominated Georgia but fell behind when the Bulldogs blocked a punt and recovered it in the end zone.

With less than a minute and no timeouts left, Shula moved Alabama 71 yards, completing four passes, with Al Bell, a junior college transfer, taking the last one 17 yards into the end zone for a 20-16 victory.

Alabama has outscored its opponents 33-13 in the fourth quarter this season. It had been outscored 17-6 in the final quarter at this time last year.

“We’re going into the fourth quarter with the attitude that we’re not going to get beat,” center Wes Neighbors said. “We’re going to make people take it away in the fourth quarter. We’re not going to give anything away this year.”

There are other reasons for the turnaround. For one, Perkins’ first recruiting classes are doing well. “We’ve done a good job of staying away from penalties, mistakes and turnovers,” he said, “and those were the things we couldn’t seem to dodge last year.”

Alabama has thrown only one interception, lost only one fumble and been penalized less than 30 yards a game. It is averaging almost 30 points a game while giving up only 12. Shula, son of Miami Dolphins Coach Don Shula, is rated as the second best passer in the Southeastern Conference.

Perkins said that last Saturday his team, which scored on its first five possessions, handled Cincinnati “the way good football teams” are supposed to handle such teams.

How good his 15th-ranked team really is has yet to be determined, with major tests ahead against Penn State, Tennessee, improved Memphis State, Mississippi State, LSU and Auburn.

But 3-0 is sitting a lot better with Alabama fans than 0-2.