This is an opinion column.

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Something tells me that Alabama coach Nick Saban’s pregame speech before the 2024 Rose Bowl will be a little different than the one almost 100 years ago.

The world was really different back then. The Ottoman Empire was coming to an end, for example, and the invention of Instagram was still a couple years away. People sent literal telegrams. In the South, the Civil War was still a touchy subject for a lot of people. In the sports world, Tulane, Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech were the preeminent college football powers in the Deep South. Not for long, though. Stuff was changing.

For good or ill, college football was beginning to represent something more than just a game.

That’s where Alabama entered the national picture thanks in large part to the Rose Bowl and a guy named Champ Pickens.

Alabama plays Michigan in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day. Wednesday was my travel day to the big game, so I did some research. Not about the Ottoman Empire, but about Alabama, the Rose Bowl and one of the most influential super fans in the history of college football.

It’s impossible to fully appreciate Alabama’s place in college football without mentioning the 1926 Rose Bowl. Alabama’s fight song references that game but noting that bit of trivia is like dusting off the jacket of an old leather-bound book. There’s way more to the story. Truly understanding Alabama’s long-ago ties to the Rose Bowl and how that game transformed Alabama into a college football superpower takes remembering Pickens, Alabama’s first booster.

Pickens was like a mix between Don King, Greg Byrne, a caller on the Paul Finebaum Show and a Civil War statue. Sometimes Pickens would give people old Confederate currency and tell them to hold onto it because “the South was going to rise again.” When he wasn’t dreaming for the old days, Pickens was busy trying to make Alabama football the pride of the Southland.

He largely succeeded thanks to the 1926 Rose Bowl.

Pickens got into college football in 1896 as the team manager for Alabama. Understand the function of “team managers” back in the day.

Football on campus was more like a club back then, and team managers were students who raised money, made schedules, recruited players, hustled fans to the game, collected the gate, kept the books, organized travel and logged away the records. These days, about 100 people on Saban’s staff share the work of a guy like ol’ Champ Pickens.

After graduating, Pickens became Alabama’s unofficial athletics director. He even coined the name the “Million Dollar Band.” A big talker, Pickens’ greatest skill was networking. The University of Alabama’s Greek system is notorious for its “Machine.” If Pickens were alive today, he’d probably claim to have created it so students would support the football team. How influential was Pickens? He didn’t invent the SEC, but he did enough to have the first trophy of the Southern Conference named in his honor.

It’s because he paid to have it made, and then named it the Champ Pickens Cup.

In the early days, ol’ Champ Pickens did more for football in the South than just about anyone around. After helping bring Alabama football to life, and then fostering what would become the SEC, Pickens became the founder of the Blue-Gray football game. The Blue-Gray Football Classic was an old college football all-star game that ran from 1939 to 2003. It was between the North and South, of course, because ol’ Champ Pickens was gonna ‘Champ Pickens’ as long as he could.

These days, people would call ol’ Champ Pickens a meme. Back then he was a revolutionary. College football is big business these days. Let’s put it this way. Pickens wouldn’t have any qualms with paying players to win games for Alabama. College football was his life, and Alabama football was his soul.

People would later call that first Rose Bowl victory for Alabama in 1926 “the football game that changed the South.” Pickens was the guy who engineered that mythos by something he did leading up to the game.

Alabama football was mostly unknown outside the South in 1925. Coach Wallace Wade had an incredible team, though, and Pickens wanted his “griders” to receive as much recognition as possible. According to Pickens, he encouraged Alabama governor William W. Brandon to telegraph Rose Bowl officials before the end of Alabama’s season. It helped position Alabama for an invite after Tulane declined to play in the game.

Tulane’s president didn’t want football to interfere with final exams at the end of the fall semester. Alabama had a similar policy prohibiting participation in bowl games, but school president George H. Denny changed the rule so Alabama could travel to California for the big game. Smart move. Alabama football helped shape the university and college football in the South from that point forward.

Alabama had to actually win the Rose Bowl for all of that stuff to happen, though, and the Crimson Tide was an underdog to the Washington Huskies. Enter ol’ Champ Pickens.

Pickens had a plan to motivate Alabama’s players, and it leaned on the one thing that Pickens loved just as much as football, glorifying the South’s bloody struggle in the American Civil War.

John McCallum’s 1980 book on the early history of the SEC quotes ol’ Champ Pickens about the 1926 Rose Bowl:

Some of our players never before had been away from home. Pasadena seemed to them like another planet. They were nervous, homesick. I made some calls to Tuscaloosa and instructed the folks to start a barrage of telegrams to our locker room.

“Remind our kids that now is their chance to get even with the damn Yankees,” I said.

That Civil War pitch will do it every time. Alabama had been the West Point of the South during the war; General Grant ordered many of our most cherished buildings leveled. So in response to my last-minute pleas, Bama fans burned up the telegraph lines. Just before rushing out on the field to do battle, our kids gathered in a large semicircle around Coach Wade and heard the messages.

There was not a dry eye in the room. The sentiment was pretty well summed up by the war whoop of one of our big linemen: “Le me at ‘em! I’ll murder those [expletive deleted] murderers!” Poor Huskies … poor innocent Washington. Their ancestors weren’t even involved in the Civil War; they were too busy fighting Indians with tribe names Puyallup, Yakima, and such. But they were north of the Mason-Dixon line, weren’t they? That’s all our kids had to know.

Maybe Pickens stretched the truth a little bit, but don’t let that get in the way of a saber-rattling story about Southern football valor. After the Rose Bowl victory, Alabama’s team was celebrated like a conquering army on its trip home through the South. Good thing for Alabama ol’ Champ Pickens didn’t stick to sports. We won’t give him credit for inventing bulletin board material, but he perfected the art form for the Rose Bowl.

Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of the most controversial sports book ever written, “We Want Bama”. It’s a love story about wild times, togetherness and rum.

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