Crimson Tide, After Reaching Low Ebb, on Rise Again

The low point came last year. It was homecoming at the University of Alabama. It was the day that a museum honoring the legendary Bear Bryant opened on the Tuscaloosa campus, the day the Crimson Tide lost to Ole Miss, 22-12, the day a rock came crashing through a window of second-year coach Bill Curry’s house.

The high point came last week. National television cameras, and sixth-ranked Tennessee, were at Legion Field in Birmingham, ready to see if Alabama’s 5-0 start was merely the result of loading up the early-season schedule with non-conference opponents such as Memphis State and Southwestern Louisiana and Southeastern Conference games such as Kentucky and Vanderbilt.

“I’m sure it was perceived as the biggest win we’ve had the last couple of years,” Curry said of Alabama’s 47-30 victory over the Volunteers. “But I can’t say. There have been so many.”

Certainly, there have been many great victories in the storied history of Alabama football. But in the three seasons since Curry arrived from Georgia Tech, a move that brought former university president Joab Thomas a couple of death threats for hiring a coach with a 31-43-1 record, the defeats have been more glaring.

There was a 13-10 loss to Memphis State in the fifth game of the 1987 season.

There were the successive defeats to state rival Auburn the past two years.

Even some victories, such as last season’s 29-28 Sun Bowl win over Army, were treated with disdain.

“I learned that if you just don’t quit, you can outlast most problems,” Curry said Tuesday from Tuscaloosa.

Though Alabama is 6-0 and ranked sixth heading into Penn State territory Saturday, the problems have not gone away. Despite his team’s early success this season, there is still an undercurrent of uncertainty surrounding Curry’s job security. But that is nothing new for Curry.

“I’ve never paid much attention to what other people say about me,” said Curry, 46, who is in the third year of a five-year contract. “If I did, I would have never made it through my first week of training camp in the NFL, when I was trying out for the Green Bay Packers in 1965. It was funny to people that I would try out for that team.

“I’ve always started out as the underdog. When I was a player, people thought I was too small or too slow or not strong enough. Then, as a coach, I wasn’t the right one for the job. The only asset I have is that I keep working hard every day. That’s something I learned from my parents.”

But there was nothing to prepare Curry for what happened upon his arrival at Alabama. It hardly mattered that Ray Perkins had been there three years and, depending on one’s perspective, had been either mildly successful (33-15-1) or an outright failure (no major bowls or national championships).

A 7-5 record and three straight defeats that first season, as well as a number of highly publicized off-campus incidents involving some of Curry’s players, did not endear the new coach to the community. There were calls to local radio shows demanding his resignation. There were nasty, unsigned letters to Curry himself.

“It got pretty ugly,” said one former athletic department official. “This was not your typical fire-the-coach kind of thing. There were some around here who worried about Bill’s safety.”

Nor did it help that Thomas stepped down in the summer of 1988 to become a university biology professor, a move precipitated in part by the pressure he was under after Curry’s hiring. Or that Athletic Director Steve Sloan, a close friend and coaching rival when both were in the Atlantic Coast Conference, resigned last summer because of philosophical differences with Roger Sayers, Alabama’s new president.

Or that Heisman Trophy candidate Bobby Humphrey opted last spring to forgo his senior year to play in the National Football League.

But as Curry likes to say, “If you’re a mountain climber, you want to climb Everest.”

The Crimson Tide, behind senior quarterback Gary Hollingsworth, is halfway up its mountain. Last week’s victory gave Alabama sole possession of first place in the SEC and served as Hollingsworth’s official coming-out party: After not playing a down his first three years, Hollingsworth was 32 of 46 for 379 yards passing and three touchdowns against Tennessee.

“One of the most impressive performances I have ever seen by a quarterback,” said Tennessee Coach Johnny Majors.

Aside from Hollingsworth, one of the biggest reasons for Alabama’s turnaround this season is offensive coordinator Homer Smith, in his second year. Generally regarded by his peers as an offensive innovator, Smith has opened up a game plan that had been criticized recently as bland and predictable.

It has opened a lot of eyes, Curry’s included.

“The whole approach, and it’s not that unusual, is that we want to run a balanced offense,” said Curry. “In the past, that’s meant to run and pass an equal number of times. But we want to have the capacity to run or pass wherever we are on the field, depending on the situation. It might mean a trap up the middle or a post pattern. We want to force the other team to defend the whole field.”

The Crimson Tide is averaging 423.5 yards of offense, 17th in the nation, 235.7 passing. The latter stat is the one that frightens Penn State Coach Joe Paterno, whose team’s pass defense ranks 40th in the country (202.5 yards), right between Wake Forest and Maryland.

“They can beat you a lot of different ways,” Paterno said Tuesday from State College, Pa. “This is the best Alabama team I’ve seen since 1979.”

That was the year Alabama finished 12-0, beat Arkansas in the Sugar Bowl and was a unanimous choice as national champion. The same kind of talk has started around Tuscaloosa and Birmingham and Mobile.