EDITOR’S NOTE: Every day until Aug. 29, Creg Stephenson is counting down significant numbers in Alabama football history, both in the lead-up to the 2025 football season and in commemoration of the Crimson Tide’s first national championship 100 years ago. The number could be attached to a year, a uniform number or even a football-specific statistic. We hope you enjoy.

Alabama and Auburn first played a football game against each other in 1893 at Lakeside Park in Birmingham, but the Iron Bowl as we know it came into being on Dec. 4, 1948, at Legion Field.

That was the day the Crimson Tide and Tigers ended a four-decade cold war between the schools, meeting on the gridiron for the first time since 1907. Alabama won 55-0 in the first modern Iron Bowl, touching off the rivalry that would become the most-famous in the SEC.

The reason the two in-state schools didn’t play each other for 41 years depends upon whom you ask (or asked, as all of the complainants are long deceased). At one point, Auburn alleged that Alabama had used “ringers” (players who were not students) during the 1905 and 1906 games, which the Crimson Tide won by a combined score of 40-0.

Other complaints included illegal “tactics” (pre-snap shifting, among others things), per diem amounts for travel and how officials would be chosen. It was not until the state legislature got involved after World War II by threatening to withhold funding that Alabama and Auburn finally agreed to play again.

A banner headline in the May 20, 1948, edition of The Birmingham News read “Alabama-Auburn Game Booked Here.” The story reported that both the 1948 and 1949 Alabama-Auburn games would be played at Legion Field (a tradition that continued through 1988).

Student body presidents from the two schools literally buried a hatchet in Birmingham’s Woodrow Wilson Park to celebrate the rivalry’s renewal. Auburn’s Gillis Cammack and Alabama’s Willie Johns dug the hole together and Cammack dropped the hatchet in, he told AL.com in 2010, when he was 86 years old.

“The idea was we bury the hatchet and we’d forget about all the bad things between the schools,” said Cammack, who died in 2013. “I threw the hatchet in. Just dropped it in a hole is all. I don’t imagine it stayed there long. Someone probably dug it up before we left.”

In addition, the Omicron Delta Kappa honor society created the ODK Sportsmanship Trophy, which would be awarded to the winning school. Captains Ray Richeson of Alabama and Russ Inman of Auburn were photographed with the trophy prior to the 1948 game.

Alabama had slipped a bit from the Wallace Wade/Frank Thomas glory years by 1948, and carried a 5-4-1 record into its first meeting with Auburn since the first decade of the 20th century. Do-everything halfback Harry Gilmer had graduated the year before, and coach Harold “Red” Drew’s Crimson Tide had suffered decisive losses to Tennessee, Georgia and LSU during the season, as well as a seven-point defeat to Tulane and a tie with Vanderbilt.

Auburn, though, was at one of its lower ebbs in its football history in the late 1940s, having not had a winning season since before the war. Coach Earl Brown’s Tigers beat Southern Miss 20-14 in their 1948 opener, then tied Louisiana Tech before losing seven consecutive games heading into their meeting with Auburn on the first Saturday in December.

On an afternoon “as bright as a ’39-model blue serge suit,” as Henry Vance of the Birmingham News wrote, Alabama wholly throttled Auburn before a crowd of 46,000. The Crimson Tide’s Ed Salem was the hero of the day, accounting for four touchdowns and 28 of his team’s 55 points.

Salem, who had starred at Birmingham’s Ramsay High School, completed eight of 10 passes for 159 yards and three touchdowns and also ran for a score. In addition, the sophomore halfback connected on seven of eight extra-point attempts.

Auburn never advanced beyond the Alabama 40-yard line, though the Tigers’ offense was hamstrung by the loss of star halfback Travis Tidwell to injury in the first half. But there was no stopping the Crimson Tide, which rang up 404 yards of offense and limited Auburn to three net rushing yards while intercepting four passes.

The loss was Auburn’s worst since a 68-7 defeat to Georgia Tech in 1917, and remains the most-decisive score for either team in the Iron Bowl. Alabama equaled the 55-point output against Auburn in 2014, but the Tigers scored 44 points in that game.

Despite the decisiveness of that first meeting in 41 years, the Iron Bowl proved to be a hit. It’s been played every year since, of course, with Alabama holding a 47-30 edge since 1948 (a 14-13 upset win by Auburn in 1949 probably went a long way toward validating the rivalry’s renewal).

But back on that December Saturday 78 years ago, Vance was among those who thought he’d never see the Crimson Tide and Tigers face off again.

“I don’t know what Nostradamus predicted about Saturday,” Vance wrote in The Birmingham News, “but I will say that the Auburn Tigers and the Crimson Tide have met in a football game, after shrinking away from such a contest for near a half century, here I am sitting in the press box writing this story, and if the end of the world has come, it hasn’t hit Legion Field as yet.”

Coming Monday: Our countdown to kickoff continues with No. 47, a last-second field goal hands Alabama an upset victory.