Written by Matt Zemek at The Comeback
Derrick Henry won on Saturday night in New York. So did the University of Alabama and the SEC.
The relationships connecting these realities are both obvious and historically layered.
Running back Derrick Henry won the 2015 Heisman Memorial Trophy, basking in the glow of college football’s most prestigious individual achievement at the Downtown Athletic Club. On the 80th anniversary of this award — first given in 1935 to Jay Berwanger of the University of Chicago — it was fitting that a player from college football’s most successful program took home the stiff-arm trophy.
One would think that Alabama — with its mountain of national championships and reclaimed supremacy in the sport — would have more than two Heisman winners by now. At the start of the Heisman era, legendary coach Frank Thomas built Alabama into a powerhouse. A continuously dominant program during Bear Bryant’s tenure, Alabama stood at the top of college football for roughly two straight decades with barely any interruption (two transitional seasons). Gene Stallings presided over several highly fruitful seasons in the 1990s. Now, Nick Saban has made Alabama an annual juggernaut… and that’s where the contours of this story come into focus.
When Alabama succeeded in the 1990s, college football was just beginning to attain the widespread (television and mass-media) visibility it enjoys today. It’s true that in many ways, college football was more prominent as a national sport in the second quarter of the 20th century than in the last one.
From the mid-1920s through the World War II era of college football, the sport played many of its biggest games at Yankee Stadium. Northeastern media centers such as New York were often the featured locations for the biggest games on the calendar. Grantland Rice and other writers with a national reach and reputation created a powerful aura in and around college football, which helped forge the identities of Notre Dame and Army and Michigan and Illinois.
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