The biggest help by far for me was reading the newspaper articles. People with actual knowledge of the game describe the major plays in a way that makes it possible not only to understand what went on in the game, but also to actually match the photos to specific plays. It's super helpful to learn, for example, that a certain player was only on the field in the second half of the game, that a specific scoring drive was dominated by certain players, or the yard line where a play ended.
One Tuscaloosa News article described a play like this: "Davis had the big play in the drive, running 31 yards to the Tennessee nine. Davis broke over guard, raced to the left sideline, and dragged Tennessee players along the way." Lo and behold, one of my photo sequences shows Davis racing along the very edge of the field, pursued by Tennessee players in what is obviously a huge run; the background shows that it was significant yardage and the entry tunnel in the background of the first photo places it at either the Tennessee 40 or the Alabama 35, based on photos of Legion Field. I'm fairly confident from this that I've identified the exact play shown in this photo.
One more hint for the old newspapers: they're scanned from microfilm, so sometimes the pages are sideways. I zoomed in as far as I could, then used the Windows snipping tool (though any screenshot tool will work) to grab images of the articles, pasted them into Word and then rotated them 90 degrees. End result: readable articles.
Here's a list of useful links for anyone still trying to identify plays:
- Good, clear photo of Legion Field
- Tuscaloosa News (free at Google News Archive) (hint: game coverage on Sundays)
- List of Alabama Online Historical Newspapers
- List of United States Online Historical Newspapers
- The Final Book for the January 2010 game against Texas.
Excellent work!!
ReplyDelete