Wallace Wade looms over Alabama football success 100 years later | Goodbread

NCAAF College Football News, Photos, Stats, Scores, Schedule & Videos...

This story is one in a series looking back 100 years at Alabama football's first national championship, captured with a victory over Washington in the Jan. 1, 1926, Rose Bowl. It marked the beginning of a century of championship success.

Wallace Wade was a three-time national champion as Alabama football's coach, earning its first a century ago in 1925. He piled up those three rings in only eight seasons, roughly the same per-year rate as Nick Saban's six in 17.

But the first wasn't like any that followed.

And while Wade will always be known as the man who started the Crimson Tide on its path of greatness,  few know just how closely he was connected to the program's success long after he left. Indeed, it's fair to wonder how many of the 15 national titles UA claims post-Wallace it would've had without him.

Wade left Alabama for Duke in 1931. He was respected enough as both a coach and athletics director that when he whispered the name Frank Thomas in the ear of UA President George Denny as his proper successor, Denny wasted no time following through with the hire. Thomas, then an assistant at Georgia, went on to win a national championship in 1934. He later led the 1941 team that would become Alabama's flimsiest claim to a national title, on a 9-2 season.

Regardless, Thomas compiled a stellar record of 115-24-7. And absent Wade's recommendation, who knows who would've succeeded him?

If Wade-to-Thomas is straight-line logic on what Wade's influence did for Alabama in the long-term, consider, as well, a wiggly line.

On the day Wade defeated Washington in the Rose Bowl, 20-19, for Alabama's first championship, the South had a "we are all Alabama" attitude. Football in the region had been looked down upon until then, to the point that the Crimson Tide's invitation to play in the Rose Bowl, despite a 9-0 record, came as a surprise.

Radios all over the South were tuned into the game, and according to a Wade biography by author Lewis Bowling, one of them was in Fordyce, Arkansas, where a 12-year-old Paul W. "Bear" Bryant listened to a college football game for the first time in his life. It was the beginning of Bryant's love for the school, and six years before he accepted a scholarship offer from Wade's hand-picked successor, Thomas.

Bryant's success, of course, can't be attributed to Wade.

But Wade, whom Bryant came to revere, was no small factor in the Bear's desire to forge that success in Tuscaloosa.

Along with a lasting influence on the successful Alabama coaches who followed him, Wade also had a strong hand in the Crimson Tide's strong tradition of defensive play. He ran a dominant defense as an assistant coach at Vanderbilt before coming to UA and maintained that reputation throughout his career as a head coach. Across a 24-game unbeaten streak from 1924-1927, which encompassed back-to-back national championships, Wade's defenses allowed just 2.2 points per game and shut out more than half of his opponents.

A hard-edged taskmaster on the practice field, Wade, like many who would follow him in the role, insisted on perfection. It's fitting that at the edge of the Alabama campus, Wallace Wade Avenue intersects with Bryant Drive.

He got Alabama's championships started.

But he had a hand in some won long after he was gone.

Tuscaloosa News columnist Chase Goodbread is also the weekly co-host of Crimson Cover TV on WVUA-23. Reach him at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on X.com @chasegoodbread.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Wallace Wade legacy looms 100 years after Alabama football's first championship

More at NCAAF College Football News, Photos, Stats, Scores, Schedule & Videos