Back When: The Night UAB Walked Into Jordan-Hare

Paul Finebaum wrote his prediction in the Birmingham Post-Herald the morning of the game. “If Auburn wanted to,” he wrote, “this game could probably go into triple digits.”

Sports Illustrated had already set the table. UAB was ranked 111th out of 111 Division I-A teams — dead last in the country. The magazine joked that the school’s “prestigious physical therapy program could be busy.” One publication called the matchup the mismatch of the year.

Six years earlier, the Blazers were a club team. The season before, Troy State had beaten them 60-7. UAB athletic director Gene Bartow would later tell the Birmingham News his team carried half the scholarship players Auburn did. The Associated Press ranked the Tigers 16th in the nation.

Nobody gave them a chance. Finebaum noted that Auburn head coach Terry Bowden had ducked out of practice that week for a helicopter ride to Birmingham to catch a James Taylor concert. Hard to imagine him doing that the week of the Florida game, Finebaum wrote.

On the evening of Aug. 31, 1996, UAB walked into Jordan-Hare Stadium anyway.

A crowd of 80,645 filled Jordan-Hare for UAB’s first Division I-A game. Between 4,000 and 5,000 of them were UAB fans — and school hadn’t even started yet, according to Bob Johnson’s report in the Post-Herald.

The game started badly. On UAB’s fourth snap, Auburn blocked Kevin Tatarek’s punt. That led to a field goal. The Blazers also had a field goal attempt by Jake Arians blocked in the first half. It could have unraveled right there.

It didn’t.

UAB’s defense held Auburn without a touchdown for over three quarters. The Tigers’ only points through three periods came off the foot of junior college transfer Jaret Holmes, who hit field goals from 18, 46, 47, 50 and 30 yards. As Phillip Marshall wrote in the Huntsville Times, Holmes “wasn’t supposed to be needed for five field goals, not on this night.”

At halftime, the score was 9-0. Three field goals. That was it.

“The crowd of 80,645 watched in dismay as the Blazers outhit and outhustled the Tigers for a half,” Marshall wrote. “They blitzed and confused Auburn’s young offensive line.”

Neal Sims put it plainly in the Birmingham News. It was Auburn’s 963rd game of football and UAB’s first. “For three quarters of it,” Sims wrote, “you couldn’t tell it from the old-timer.”

The Blazers had their own chances on offense. Quarterback Rodney Hudson completed a 40-yard pass to Lamar Lee in the second quarter while being leveled by a defender — Clyde Bolton named it the best pass play of the day in the News. Cornerback Dainon Sidney picked off Auburn quarterback Dameyune Craig at the UAB 9-yard line. Defensive tackle Sterrick Morgan hit Craig from behind and knocked the ball loose. Defensive end Bryan Gay sacked Craig and drew a “UAB” chant from the Blazer section.

Senior tailback Robert Davis, who had missed the previous season and was not expected to contribute, ran 13 times for 64 yards against the Auburn front.

Watson Brown told Wayne Martin of the Birmingham News that the Blazers had chances to score. “We had the interception at the goal line. Rodney had a defender right in his face and under-threw it,” Brown said. “Then we had a pass dropped by Kenny Causey in the first half when I think he might have scored.”

Hudson nearly dehydrated during the game. He came back in the second half anyway. “Hudson played his heart out, especially the first half,” Brown told Martin.

Auburn wore them down. Bowden went to a no-huddle offense in the second half to keep UAB from catching its breath. Both touchdowns came in the fourth quarter, both scored by reserves. The final was 29-0.

“When we got to the fourth quarter we were really worn down,” Brown told Martin. “If we hadn’t been a team in great physical condition we would have really been blown out.”

But the score was not the story. The story was what UAB proved by showing up and competing.

“They came to see a massacre and a football game broke out,” Marshall wrote.

Clyde Bolton’s column in the Sunday News carried the headline: “Blazers were losers only on scoreboard.”

“One publication rated UAB 111th among the 111 Division I-A teams,” Bolton wrote, “but the team that fought Auburn with verve and desire isn’t at the bottom of the big league.”

“Glib commentators said Auburn could name the score,” he wrote. “It could make 100 points if it desired. But this wasn’t that type of game.”

Bolton added a line that captured what the night meant for a young program: “The Blazers prevented the Tigers from scoring a touchdown until the fourth period. That is something to build upon, something for players in a young program to remember when the practices are long and the weather is cold and the bruises are painful.”

John Pruett, the sports editor of the Huntsville Times, wrote that without Holmes’ kicking and the Auburn defense, the game “could have conceivably turned into one of the most shocking upsets in the long history of the college game.”

“If Coach Watson Brown’s young Blazers were scared, nervous or intimidated, it certainly didn’t show,” Pruett wrote. “If anybody on the visiting side didn’t play all-out, it was impossible to tell. If anybody quit, he wasn’t wearing the gold and green of UAB.”

Johnson reported that the UAB section was on its feet the entire game. A drizzle rolled in before halftime. Nobody left.

The Post-Herald captured one of the night’s best details: UAB students passed around a mock collection in the stands, trying to scrape together a quarter so Terry Bowden could call his father — Florida State coach Bobby Bowden — at halftime for help.

Michele Allison, a senior cheerleader who had been cheering for UAB since the Division III days, told the Post-Herald what the night meant. “I was cheering for UAB four years ago when we were Division III and playing schools like Wofford and Morehead State, schools no one had ever heard of before,” she said. “And to be here now and playing Auburn, it’s exciting.”

“Everybody just trashed us coming into this game,” Allison said. “Nobody thought we could play like this against a team like Auburn.”

Steven Rodgers, a UAB junior from Hayden, told Bob Johnson of the Post-Herald: “The greatest thing about this is that for one-half anyway, every sportswriter in America was wrong.”

Tim Welbourne, a sophomore from Trussville, showed up shirtless and covered in green paint. “This is awesome,” he told the Post-Herald. “This is so close. Nobody expected it to be like this.”

Shannon Roddam, a UAB sophomore and former Alabama fan from Hewitt-Trussville, told the Post-Herald: “Now, my heart belongs to UAB.”

Gene Bartow watched from the radio booth.

Bartow had spent 10 years pushing to bring Division I-A football to Birmingham. According to the Birmingham News, he was in the press box before kickoff — but he had given away every ticket he had, including his own. His wife, Ruth, ended up in the stands as the weather turned. Bartow watched the game from the radio booth alongside play-by-play voice Gary Sanders and John Whitcomb.

The man who built the program didn’t even keep a seat for himself.

“It’s happened,” Bartow told the News. “People didn’t think it would. But talk didn’t worry Watson Brown and it didn’t worry me.”

He compared the night to the first game in UAB basketball history — a loss to Nebraska in 1978. “We played well, but we lost,” Bartow said. “We had a great crowd, and we started something that would build into a great program. We have seen the start of something just like that here tonight.”

“This is certainly one of the most significant days in our history,” he told the News. “The Nebraska basketball game that started the program is the only one that might match up.”

The players knew what they had done.

“This game says a lot for the program,” senior linebacker Joey Roberto told Cary Estes of the Post-Herald. “We’re ranked 111th? Come on. Look at some of the programs ranked above us. We didn’t get a fair shake.”

Gay, the defensive end whose sack of Craig had set off the UAB chant, put it bluntly to Estes: “The first time we went out there and hit the (expletive) out of them, they realized we weren’t the Sisters of the Poor.”

“Everybody doubted us, saying we were going to lose 80-0,” Gay said. “We proved we weren’t as bad as everybody thought we were.”

Davis said the game lit a fuse. “We can win the rest of these games,” he told Estes. “There’s no doubt about it. This game sparked a fire for us.”

Roberto understood the road ahead. “This is just the first game,” he told Estes. “We will have to get better and go out and prove ourselves week after week. But this game is going to help a whole lot. We know now that, physically, we can hang with these guys.”

Brown, as always, refused to let anyone get comfortable. “We showed we’re better than people were thinking,” he told Estes the next day. “But we’re still not a very good team. And I don’t want the players thinking that we are.”

Then he acknowledged what the night meant. “I think it shows that we’re actually ahead of schedule right now,” Brown said. “We’re not near there. This game does not mean that UAB has arrived. But there’s no doubt we can compete. We can become a good Division I-A program. Hopefully, this game will help convince people of that.”

Cary Estes framed it perfectly in the Post-Herald that Monday. Clemson — the 1981 national champion — lost to North Carolina 45-0 that same Saturday. Purdue lost to Michigan State 52-14. UAB, the team ranked dead last in the country, lost to No. 16 Auburn 29-0 and earned something neither of those programs needed that day.

Respect.

“If any team was going to lose by epic proportions on Saturday, surely it would be the Blazers,” Estes wrote. “But somehow, be it because of a lackluster performance by the Tigers or a slippery wet field or some unexplained cosmic convergence, the expected massacre did not occur.”

The game happened because of a phone call two years earlier. In the fall of 1994, North Texas cancelled on Auburn. Auburn AD David Housel told the Birmingham News that someone called Bartow. They met in Montgomery on a Sunday. They signed the deal on Tuesday. UAB’s first Division I-A game would be at Jordan-Hare Stadium.

Housel, the Auburn AD, told the News that night: “I’m really envious of UAB fans. It’ll be nice for UAB fans to go back someday and look at a time capsule and see about this game.”

Thirty years later, here it is.

Dainon Sidney, the junior cornerback who picked off Craig in the second quarter and helped hold Auburn’s offense at bay for three quarters, gave the Post-Herald the last word that night.

“With time, maybe five years down the road, we might play them again,” Sidney said. “And maybe the next time the score will be UAB 29, Auburn 0.”

Sources: The Birmingham News (Jimmy Bryan, Wayne Martin, Neal Sims, Clyde Bolton), Birmingham Post-Herald (Bob Johnson, Cary Estes, Steve Kirk, Paul Finebaum), The Huntsville Times (Phillip Marshall, John Pruett). All articles published Aug. 31 – Sept. 2, 1996.