Did you know Alabama basketball won a national championship? That’s OK: UA didn’t either

• Alabama’s 1929-30 basketball team went undefeated and won the Southern Conference championship.
• The Premo-Porretta Power Poll, a retroactive ranking system, named Alabama the national champion for that season.
• The ranking system was created by Pat Premo and Phil Porretta, who used statistical analysis to compare teams from different eras.
• Alabama’s athletic department does not officially recognize the 1929-30 team as national champions.

Did you know Alabama basketball won a national championship? The university didn’t either.

Old newspaper clippings and UA yearbooks chronicle a 100-plus season history that now lies in the hands of Crimson Tide coach Nate Oats as he looks to win the program’s first NCAA Tournament championship. That tournament didn’t commence until 1939 and was far from the spectacle of today’s March Madness.

Decades ago, a couple of sports junkies − a professor and a computer programmer − got together to dedicate their spare time to determining who would have cut down championship nets before the NCAA Tournament began.

The 1929-1930 Alabama team was one of them.

The Premo-Porretta Power Poll was created by Pat Premo, an accounting professor at St. Bonaventure University, and Phil Porretta, a computer programmer, and first released to the public in 1995.

Thirty years later, The Tuscaloosa News dug in to learn the story of how those pre-tournament college basketball national championships were retroactively decided, and what put the Crimson Tide in that company.

The story behind Alabama basketball’s mythical national championship

Premo died in 2021 and Porretta two years later. Their vast research uncovered long-lost results from games against AAU and YMCA teams that college media guides around the country were missing.

“It was a lifetime,” Premo’s wife, Kathleen, said of the research efforts.

An avid list-maker, Premo would compile data for players in the games forgotten by the record books to project how they would’ve performed against each other. Basically, Premo and Porretta were ideating the earliest forms of fantasy sports before it became a craze.

Most of those writings and rosters are gone now. At least on Premo’s end.

“He had a lot of information. But, you know, nobody seemed interested. So, all the work he had done, I’ve tossed most of it,” Kathleen said. “It was just so massive, his collection; he just loved to deep to dive into the history of places like Alabama and Kentucky.”

Had they not “run into a brick wall” in their research, there would probably be a list of Premo-Porretta early women’s basketball national champions, too, according to Kathleen.

Oftentimes, when Pat wasn’t hunkered down in his dimly-lit, dusty basement office, quests for research would become family road trips for the Premos. With no classes to teach, summer usually brought the most progress.

“I don’t know what he was even researching, but we had to drive to Kentucky so he could check on something that was there,” Kathleen recalled. Her husband was a man of many interests, so the visit could’ve just as easily been for football or his other love, horse racing, as for basketball research.

Premo’s son, Daniel, is a web developer and previously worked for Turner Broadcasting and “Sports Illustrated,” taking part in revamping the technology behind the NBA Draft. But it’s not because he was ever inspired by his father’s techie pal Porretta or the old friends’ love for basketball.

Daniel didn’t know that his father’s works were chronicled in ESPN’s “Encyclopedia of College Basketball,” let alone that they even existed, until he looked up his dad on Wikipedia after his death.

Neither he nor his mother ever met Porretta, nor found out how Phil managed to connect with him in California all the way from New York in a time without networking apps like LinkedIn.

“We still have this house in New York, and I was there in the summer, and (Phil) called one time to talk to Pat, and I said, ‘Oh, you know, he just died,’ so that was the only time I spoke with him,” said Kathleen, who now resides in Brookhaven, Georgia.

The first time Kathleen and Daniel had a conversation about Premo’s historical basketball work came when the two discussed speaking with The Tuscaloosa News for this story.

“He really enjoyed it, and it was over the top,” Kathleen said.

Mythical national championships and their history

Determining retroactive national titles had been done before. The Helms Athletic Foundation, an organization out of Los Angeles dedicated to promoting athletics and sportsmanship, released its own list in 1943 as determined by Bill Schroeder, who determined national champions from the 1900–01 through 1941–42 seasons.

The Helms foundation in 1943 published a list of retroactive champions that recognized Pittsburgh, not Alabama, as its national champion for the 1929-30 season.

Premo and Porretta took the exercise further, using data they collected to pit teams against each other and figure out which would have on if they had they actually played. After ranking 15 teams for the 1895–96 season to determine a mythical champ, Premo and Porretta expanded their field to 20 teams for each season from 1897 through 1909, increasing again to 25 teams from 1910 through 1948.

The case for Alabama basketball’s 1929-30 team

Alabama’s 1929-30 team made its case on the court: Under coach Hank Crisp, the Crimson Tide went 20-0 for its only undefeated basketball season to date.

In Tuscaloosa, 1930 was a big year. Iconic Denny Chimes was dedicated on campus in honor of UA president Mike Denny that May. That fall, Alabama football would go 10-0 for the program’s third claimed national title, sealed with a 24-0 victory over Washington State in the Rose Bowl on Jan. 1, 1931.

In 1929-30, Alabama basketball also won its first regular-season and league tournament championships as members of the Southern Conference, taking wins over Clemson, Georgia and Tennessee leading up to the title game in Atlanta.

The Crimson Tide features the top scoring offense in the country today, averaging 91.2 points per game. Back in those days, football scores were more common on the hardwood.

Alabama dealt the Birmingham Boys Club a 38-9 defeat in mid-December 1929, also beating Birmingham YMCA and Cramton Lumber Company on the same day, all in Birmingham. UA hung a season-high 40 points on Sewanee in February.

On the season, Alabama averaged 36.3 points. By comparison, All-American guard Mark Sears has scored 30-plus points three times this season.

Alabama allowed an average of just 19.75 points over its 20 games.

As UA’s Corolla yearbook for 1930 went to press, staff learned Alabama had won the Southern Conference tournament by defeating Duke 31-24 in the final game, which ended up being what the yearbook called a “fitting climax to a brilliant season without defeat.”

The season also saw the program’s first All-American, James Marcus Hood, who was also a member of Alabama’s national champion football team that year with basketball teammate Earl Smith, once a football team captain.

Hood, better known as “Lindy,” was Alabama’s starting center. He got his nickname on a trip to New Orleans for a game against Tulane when the crowd in a hotel lobby believed the college kid to be aviator Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 had become the first to make a nonstop flight from New York to Paris.

According to the annual, Hood was “undoubtedly one of the best of Dixie’s pivotmen.” The long-legged, 6-foot-5 big man was described as a “lanky individual” with a “rangy appearance” who was a “menace on two legs.” He became an All-Southern center and one of College Humor’s 1931 All-Americans.

The thigh-high shorts of that era could have even made a 5-9 player look lanky. The trend of tube socks folded over the ankles to elongate the leg helped: Hood and his teammates wore them in that fashion.

Alabama’s roster also included Leo O’Neill, better known as “Toad” after hitting his stride in his third “cage season” in Tuscaloosa, Stewart “Stew” Aiken, a sophomore who stepped into “varsity regalia,” in the yearbook’s parlance, after leaving what was then known as the frosh ranks, or Paul Munkasy, a “Connecticut lad” and “former Baby Tide star,” another term for freshmen at the time.

Fred Wambsganass was described as “a player after the Alabama fandoms’ own hearts.” The Corolla said Wambsganass didn’t “perform his chores in a flashy, dazzling manner, but was there ready to do his part at any stage of the game.“

An unrecognized mythical national title

Alabama’s athletic department recognizes 18 football national championships, including some that were retroactively awarded. The 1930 football title, in fact, was first recognized in 1934 by Spalding’s Foot Ball Guide as chosen by Parke Hill Davis, a former player and coach.

UA does not, however, recognize the 1929-30 basketball team’s mythical national title. In fact, a UA spokesperson had never heard of the Premo-Porretta honor when contacted about it by The Tuscaloosa News. The Alabama basketball media guide notes the squad as Southern Conference champion with no mention of a national title.

Oats, too, was unaware. He said this in an interview with The Tuscaloosa News this past December:

“We’re definitely not a blue blood, because we’ve only been to the one Final Four and haven’t won a national championship here, but we’re a basketball school now.”

That’s OK. The originators didn’t expect schools to hang banners over its findings.

Pittsburgh’s media guide, incidentally, recognizes the Helms Foundation national championship from the same season, and another from that era. Banners commemorating the accomplishments hang in the Petersen Events Center.

“I don’t think my dad ever thought that he stacked up to something like the NCAA basketball tournament,” Daniel Premo said. “I don’t think he thought that anybody should make a plaque or a trophy for anything about this.

“I really do think it was just for his own enjoyment.”

Emilee Smarr covers Alabama basketball and Crimson Tide athletics for the Tuscaloosa News. She can be reached via email at esmarr@gannett.com.

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