Iron Bowl

Iron Bowl

The Iron Bowl is an American college football rivalry game between the Auburn University Tigers and University of Alabama Crimson Tide. The game is traditionally played on Thanksgiving weekend. Alabama has a winning record against all Southeastern Conference teams and leads the series with Auburn 47–37–1.

About Iron Bowl in brief

Summary Iron BowlThe Iron Bowl is the name given to the Alabama–Auburn football rivalry. It is an American college football rivalry game between the Auburn University Tigers and University of Alabama Crimson Tide. The game is traditionally played on Thanksgiving weekend. Alabama has a winning record against all Southeastern Conference teams and leads the series with Auburn 47–37–1. Both are among the winningest programs in major college football history. Between them, one of the two teams played in the final five BCS National Championship Games, with Alabama winning in 2009, 2011, and 2012 and Auburn winning in 2010 and losing in 2013. The two schools have been fixtures on national television for the better part of the last four decades, and the season-ending clash has been nationally televised for all but one year since the late 1970s, the lone exception being 1993, when Auburn was barred from live TV due to NCAA sanctions. The contest became the extension of a bitter political debate which took place in the Alabama State Legislature regarding the location of the new land-grant college under the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 during the Civil War Reconstruction Era. For many years, the two schools were the only Alabama colleges in what is now Division I Football Bowl Subdivision. Together, they account for 35 SEC titles, 27 with Alabama and eight with Auburn. Alabama has won 17 national championships and is fifth all-time total wins among Division-I FBS schools while Auburn is 13th with two national championships.

Auburn has yet to participate in a playoff game, while Alabama has also made the four-team field of the successor to the BCS, the College Football Playoff, in each of its first five editions, losing in a semifinal in 2014, winning the title game in 2015 and 2017, and losing the titleGame in 2016 and 2018. Since 2000, the games have been played at Jordan–Hare Stadium in Auburn every odd-numbered year and at Bryant–Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa every even- numbered year. For much of the 20th century, the game was played every year in Birmingham, withAlabama winning 34 games and Auburn 19. Four games were played in Montgomery, Alabama, with each team winning two. In 1872, Lee County and the City of Auburn won the location for the new university in 1872 after donating more than a hundred acres and the remaining buildings and property of the East Alabama Male College. During 1870s, Auburn received no appropriated funds from the state, which received the remaining land scripts of Auburn. In 1880, U.S. Congress granted the university 40,000 acres of coal and partial compensation for the burning of coal in the civil war. By 1877, competition between the University ofAlabama and the Agricultural College had intensified between the two colleges. In January 1880, the trustees of Auburn reported to the board of trustees that Auburn had profited from the burning for 250,000 dollars in damages in the war. After the war, the university would reopen in 1871 in 1880.