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 fans like to brag that they’ve never stormed the field after a victory, doing so being something reserved for lesser programs who don’t have the expectation of winning every week.
Well, never is a long time.
Older observers will remember that Alabama did on at least one occasion rush the field, or at least tried to. And it didn’t go so well.
Alabama beat Auburn 16-7 at Birmingham’s Legion Field on Dec. 1, 1990, ending four years of frustration in the Iron Bowl. The victory also clinched a winning record for the Crimson Tide, which had begun Gene Stallings’ first season at 0-3.
It was the first of three straight Iron Bowl wins for Alabama, which early the next season would embark on a school-record-tying 28-game winning streak. Included in that run was a 13-0 record in 1992, when the Crimson Tide won its first national championship in 13 years.
As the final horn sounded in the 1990 game, a few hundred Crimson Tide fans jumped out of the stands in the south end zone (the location of the Alabama student section) and headed for the field. As Mike Bolton wrote in the following day’s Birmingham News, they “were greeted by police and security personnel, some waving billy clubs.”
“Every time the police tried to tackle one person, 10 would get by them,” eyewitness Jack Munch told The News. “They were going for the goal posts. “The police began to arrest them, but they made the mistake of handcuffing them and putting them around the goal post, too close to the end zone. … Whiskey bottles started flying out of the stands. The police finally just lost their temper.”
Police officers eventually began handcuffing fans and placing them in the middle of the field. At least 12 were arrested and another 15 detained before being released, charged with or cited for crimes such as trespassing, disorderly conduct, public intoxication and interfering with police.
According to some reports, the reason more fans weren’t arrested was because the 50-60 police and security officers on hand that day at Legion Field ran out of handcuffs. Other field-stormers were able to jump the fence and escape back into the crowd, aided by their fellow fans.
As is typical at college football games, fans at the 1990 Iron Bowl were warned over the loudspeaker at various times during the afternoon not to enter the field once the game ended. Alabama athletics director Hootie Ingram — who was reportedly in the Crimson Tide locker room not on the field when the melee erupted — praised the police for controlling the situation.
“I’m glad the Birmingham police did their job,” Ingram told the Birmingham News the following day. “People should have respect and patience for the security officers. I hope all our fans understand that something that might have seemed bad might have saved someone’s life.”
Not everyone saw it that way. A group of six Alabama students arrested following the Iron Bowl obtained counsel with plans to sue the city of Birmingham for excessive force exhibited by police.
Some two weeks later, on Dec. 17, the matter was settled. The city of Birmingham dismissed the charges against those fans who stormed the field in exchange for assurances they would forgo any legal action.
In the 34 years since, Alabama fans have not attempted to rush the field. It’s a point of pride for the school and its supporters, and perhaps it should be.
Every other SEC school other than Florida and Georgia has seen fans rush the field at least once in recent years (often after beating Alabama). Not even the SEC instituting an escalating series of fines for field-storming (as well as court-storming in basketball) in 2004 seems to have deterred the notion.
A number of SEC athletics directors have weighed-in on the issue, some arguing that a field-storming should cost their team a home game in the future. Alabama’s Greg Byrne even suggested last year rushing the field should result in an immediate forfeit.
It appears, however —especially in this era of young people regularly filming themselves in order to post the video on social media — that field-storming is here to stay. Just not at Alabama.
