Alabama and Wisconsin will meet on the football field on Saturday for the first time in nearly every living person’s memory.

The Crimson Tide and Badgers have played only once, with homestanding Wisconsin winning 15-0 on Nov. 3, 1928. The two teams will tee it up again nearly 96 years later at 11 a.m. Saturday at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison.

Just how long ago was November 1928? Bill Greason, the Birmingham Black Barons legend who turned 100 just last week, was four years old at the time.

Herbert Hoover was elected president three days after the Alabama-Wisconsin game. Steamboat Willie, the first Disney cartoon to feature sound (along with a new character named Mickey Mouse) debuted two weeks later.

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.

An emerging football power

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. The Crimson Tide recorded its first big win outside the Deep South at Penn in 1922, but had not played a true “intersectional” game during the regular season since losing at Syracuse in 1923.

Wisconsin had been one of the top teams in the early days of the Big Ten Conference (alternately called the Western Conference in those days), winning the league title in 1896, 1897, 1901, 1906 and 1907. However, the Badgers were in a bit of a drought by the time coach Glenn Thistlethwaite arrived from defending Big Ten champion Northwestern in 1927.

With Alabama looking to expand its football horizons a bit and Wisconsin hoping to refuel its national prestige, the two schools agreed during the summer of 1927 to play a game in Madison the following fall. One Wisconsin newspaper columnist wrote that the game vs. Wade’s powerful Crimson Tide would “place the Badgers on a higher grid plane.”

“The signing of Alabama will do more for Wisconsin football than any single act of recent years,” Henry J. McCormick wrote in the Wisconsin State Journal upon the game being scheduled. “While no arrangements for a return game have been announced, it would not be surprising if Wisconsin should make the trip to the Gulf in 1929.”

(Narrator voice: Wisconsin WOULD NOT make the trip to the Gulf in 1929.)

Scouting controversy & clunky Civil War metaphors

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.

Feeding into the “North vs. South” narrative was that Wisconsin’s Camp Randall Stadium was built on the site of a Civil War training ground. Alabama’s campus, of course, had history as a military installation and had been burned to the ground by Union troops under the direction of General John Croxton just days prior to the Confederacy’s formal surrender in April 1865.

Some five months before the 1928 Alabama-Wisconsin game took place, controversy erupted between the two programs over the subject of advance scouting. Wade preferred to send an assistant coach to scout future opponents in-person; Thistlethwaite wanted to spare the expense (both financial and in manpower) and pushed for a “no scouting” agreement.

Wade’s argument for scouting was that not doing so defeated the purpose of the game being scheduled, which was to “keep in touch with football as it is played in different sections of the country.” Thistlethwaite countered that a no-scouting agreement would give both teams the element of surprise, resulting in a “spectacular battle with plenty of thrills.” (Wade’s viewpoint ended up prevailing, for whatever good it did his team.)

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.

Wisconsin won its first three games over Notre Dame, Cornell (Iowa) College and North Dakota State before tying Purdue 19-19. The Badgers bounced back to beat Michigan 7-0 (their first win against the Wolverines in 29 years) heading into the clash with Alabama.

Traveling on the ‘Coach Wade Special’

More than 200 Alabama fans — including Gov. Bibb Graves and the school’s marching band — made the trip to Wisconsin for the game, which doesn’t sound like many until you consider the expense and time-consuming nature of such a journey nearly 100 years ago. Many who traveled from Tuscaloosa to Madison did so on the L&N Railroad’s “Coach Wade Special,” which left Alabama on Thursday, Nov. 1, at the roundtrip price of $28.65 from Birmingham or $30.66 from Tuscaloosa (the equivalent of more than $500 in 2024).

Zipp Newman, legendary sports editor of the Birmingham News, also traveled with the team and filed his pre-game column with the dateline “Aboard Coach Wade Special, Nov. 2.” Newman noted that Alabama was not totally healthy, with left halfback Tony Holm “still limping” on an injured ankle and expected to sit out the game and right halfback John Henry “Flash” Suther dealing with a bad shoulder.

Alabama did have a couple of promising young linemen on its team, both sophomores. Fred Sington would go on to be an All-American in 1929 and 1930, while Frank Howard later became the highly successful coach at Clemson (both are now members of the College Football Hall of Fame).

“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.”

The game at Wisconsin was Alabama’s first outside the South since the 1926 Rose Bowl, and first in a true cold weather venue since the 1922 trip to Penn (which also took place in early November). Thus, Wade had some ideas on how to combat the potentially harsh conditions.

“Only one thing seems to be worry Coach Wade,” Newman wrote. “He is wondering what effect the cold weather is going to have on his players handling the ball. He has thought of buying white cotton gloves, using goose grease and equipping each player with an electric heater.”

Newman also played into the Civil War metaphors, as was common practice among sports writers of the time.

“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.”

Crimson Tide reduced to ‘wavelets and ripples’

The game itself was fairly competitive, if not a four-year battle to the death. Wisconsin scored on a 15-yard run by Harold Smith near the end of the first quarter to go up 6-0, then stopped Alabama’s Holm (who played after all) inside the 1 on fourth down early in the second.

Wisconsin’s Bo Cuisinier returned the second-half kickoff 64 yards into Alabama territory, setting up August Backus’ 33-yard field goal and a 9-0 lead. Cuisinier added a 15-yard touchdown run late in the third quarter for what wound up being the final points of a 15-0 Badgers victory.

Weather did end up being a factor, though it was rain and not cold that was the culprit. Wisconsin gained only 177 yards in the game but held Alabama to 94, and the teams combined for 25 punts.

It was very cold, however. When the Crimson Tide arrived in Chicago the night before, many of them encountered snow before the game.

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.

That led to some in-game improvisation by the Alabama players, Sington said in a 1988 interview with the Paul W. Bryant Museum.

“We had these light-weight cotton jerseys, no stockings, no gloves, standing up there shivering,” Sington said. “Finally, they blew the whistle and kicked off, and there was just a big pile-up there. When they unpiled, the Alabama guys were wearing the gloves. That’s the story I like to tell.”

The victory was of course front-page news in Wisconsin, with a banner headline in the next day’s Capital Times reading: “Wisconsin Batters ‘Bama, 15 to 0″.

“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.

“Overland, the Crimson Tide could make no consistent gains against the thin red line of Wisconsin ranks, and they couldn’t maintain the supremacy of the air, save for occasional flashes, and as a result, Wisconsin triumphed 15 to 0.”

Newman’s report in the following day’s Birmingham News seemed to indicate that Alabama lost to a superior team. “Alabama caught Wisconsin going at full speed here Saturday and only a great fighting spirit saved the Southerners from taking a more severe drubbing than they did and that was 15 to 0,” he wrote. “The gallant Crimsons held Wisconsin to two touchdowns and a field goal and did exceedingly well in accomplishing this much with a team that showed a powerful running attack and fierce and deadly tackling.

“Alabama’s backfield was badly disorganized and her tackling was below par.”

In his comments to Newman, Wade agreed that his team was fortunate to only lose 15-0.

“Wisconsin showed us one of the greatest teams we have ever met in an intersectional game,” he said. “The team was much stronger than we expected to find. Coach Thistlethwaite has a well-balanced line and deceptive, hard-running backs.

“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.”

A still-mysterious ‘one-off’

Suther re-injured his shoulder against Wisconsin, which appeared to end Alabama’s conference title hopes. The Crimson Tide beat Kentucky in Montgomery the following week, but then lost 33-13 in Atlanta on Nov. 17 to a Georgia Tech team that wound up 10-0.

Alabama shut out Georgia and LSU to finish the season at 6-3, a decent record but not to the standard of a team that had hopes of winning the Southern Conference in the preseason. The Crimson Tide went 6-3 again in 1929 before posting a 10-0 record and another Rose Bowl victory in Sington’s senior year of 1930. (That 1930 season wound up being Wade’s final one at Alabama, as he left for Duke after engaging in a power struggle with university president George Denny. Wade was successful enough in Durham that the Blue Devils’ stadium was named in his honor, just as the Crimson Tide’s home venue bears Denny’s name.)

Wisconsin later beat Chicago 25-0 and Iowa 13-0 before losing 6-0 at home to Minnesota in the regular-season finale to finish 7-1-1. That loss denied the Badgers the Big Ten title, as Illinois took the crown by a half-game in the final standings (4-1 to 3-1-1).

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.

What remains a mystery is why there was no return trip to Alabama for Wisconsin in 1929 or any year after that. The Badgers will make their first visit to Tuscaloosa in 2025.

Alabama released its 1929 schedule a few weeks after the loss to Wisconsin, with no explanation as to why the Badgers weren’t on it. The Crimson Tide instead scheduled Vanderbilt for the first weekend of November, and lost that game 13-0 in Nashville.

Wade’s vision of playing regular intersectional games never really caught on at Alabama. The Crimson Tide played outside the Deep South occasionally in the next three decades, including games at George Washington in 1932 and 1936, at USC in 1938, at Boston College in 1946 and at Maryland 1953.

Once the SEC integrated in the early 1970s, such games became commonplace again. Alabama played home-and-home series with the likes of USC (1970-71 and 1977-78), Nebraska (1977-78), Missouri (1975 & 1978), Rutgers (1980-81), Boston College (1983-84) and Penn State (a 10-year series from 1981-90).

But after the SEC expanded to 12 teams and eight conference games in 1992, intersectional games mostly went away again. A trip to UCLA in 2000 was Alabama’s first game outside the Deep South since 1989; the Crimson Tide also played games at Oklahoma in 2003 and Penn State in 2010.

The advent of neutral site openers in places such as Atlanta, Dallas and Orlando also resulted in true intra-sectional home-and-home games almost disappearing for nearly a decade. The SEC eventually required its members to play at least one non-conference Power 5 opponent each year, and Alabama has responded by scheduling home-and-homes with Texas, Wisconsin, Ohio State, Arizona, Minnesota, Notre Dame and West Virginia for the coming years.

But 96 years ago, such games were a true novelty. And nearly a century later, Alabama and Wisconsin finally face off again this weekend.

Special thanks to Brad Green of the Paul W. Bryant Museum for research and photo assistance, as well as Nate Jelenik and Patrick Herb of University of Wisconsin athletics for photo help.

Creg Stephenson has worked for AL.com since 2010 and has covered college football for a variety of publications since 1994. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter at @CregStephenson.