Colors

The Crimson Tide

"The Crimson Tide" is the nickname for the sports teams at the University of Alabama.

How It's Used

"As shown in HBO's 'Breaking the Huddle: The Integration of College Football,' premiering tonight, this (slightly) tongue-in-cheek ethos comes from a Sept. 12, 1970, football game in Birmingham, Ala., between Cunningham's integrated USC team and the University of Alabama, which had yet to have a single black player.

"Cunningham ran up, down and all over the Crimson Tide, en route to a 42-21 beatdown. It was there, the theory goes, that 72,175 anti-integration white Alabama fans woke up to reality: Their dearly beloved football team would never again compete for a national title without making use of black players. After the game, legendary Alabama coach Paul 'Bear' Bryant -- who already knew this -- thanked the USC coaching staff for 'what you did for us today.'"

"Alabama, for one, has forked over nearly $1 billion over the past decade and a half on such incentives (much of that sum has been spent on worker training). But in return Alabama has attracted $7 billion of investment for automakers and suppliers. In the early ’90s, the state was starving for investment and high-paying jobs, and so it pulled out all the stops to attract Mercedes-Benz, offering a $253 million incentive package in exchange for a plant that would employ about 1,500 people. When the plant opened in 1993 in the town of Vance, halfway between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, 70,000 applications were filed for the 1,500 jobs. Little did Mercedes know at the time, but it was kicking off an economic revolution that has rolled like the Crimson Tide to every corner of the state. Auto-parts suppliers followed Mercedes’s lead—and so did Honda, Toyota and Hyundai. 'When Alabama first announced it was paying $169,000 per job to attract Mercedes-Benz, everyone felt they were nuts,' says Andy Levine, president of DCI, a New York–based firm that specializes in economic-development marketing. 'Fifteen years later, it’s probably the smartest investment any state has ever made.' Indeed, 'last year, combined, all these companies supported a payroll of $5.2 billion,' says Neal Wade, director of the Alabama Development Office."

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