When Mississippi State walked out of Ladd-Peebles Stadium with a 35-7 win over South Alabama in September 2014, many Jaguars fans still counted the night as a milestone. A program barely seven years old as a varsity operation had just hosted an SEC charter member. What most of the crowd didn’t know was that intercollegiate football at the Mobile university had actually been attempted three decades earlier — by students, with no university support, and it ended in a standoff with the school’s legendary longtime president.
A Club Team Is Born
In the early 1980s, a group of South Alabama students chartered a club football team through the office of student activities, aiming to play full-contact games against club squads from other schools. They recruited a volunteer coach in Bob Windish, a World War II Marine veteran with decades of amateur and pro coaching experience who handled playbooks, depth charts and scheduling from a practice field between the track and Old Shell Road.
The roster was a throwback to the sport’s earliest college teams — students first, athletes second. The squad played its first game late in 1983 against the club team at then-Mobile College, then scheduled a three-game 1984 season: twice against Mobile College and once against Marion Military Institute’s junior college team, one of the nation’s top five programs at that level.
The 1984 Season
According to accounts from former club players, the 1984 opener featured a broken leg, a downpour and a narrow loss decided by a missed field goal. The trip to Marion, Alabama, went worse: facing a roster loaded with players whose grades had sidelined them at bigger schools, the club team was overwhelmed in a cold rain while a small tornado touched down in neighboring Hale County.
The following year brought new leadership under Jim Carter, a former semi-pro player, who enlisted Leroy Cook — the two-time Alabama All-American later drafted by the Dallas Cowboys — and other local football veterans as volunteers. The club raised thousands of dollars through a roadside collection at Michael Boulevard and Azalea Road, drew television coverage of its practices and briefly became a local story.
Shutdown at the Top
Then the university pushed back. Former members say student activities suddenly imposed new compliance demands despite years of unchanged charters, barred the team from school practice facilities, froze the club’s on-campus bank account and summoned officers to a meeting where they were told to cease activities. Former players traced the resistance to President Frederick P. Whiddon, who according to their recollections had long quashed attempts to bring football to South Alabama dating to his clashes with the University of Alabama before he founded the school. In a tense confrontation in Whiddon’s office, the president declared that neither the students nor the trustees ran the university — he did.
The club played on briefly as an independent semi-pro outfit before dissolving after the 1985 season. Windish was inducted into the American Football Association Hall of Fame in 1987. Founding club vice president Phil Williams graduated from South Alabama and later became an Alabama state senator. Whiddon led the university until trustees forced his retirement in 1998.
From Club to Varsity
Once Whiddon was gone, the school moved quickly: a new, better-organized club team launched that year, playing college squads as far away as Texas and the Carolinas. In 2007 the university announced a varsity football program, and the Jaguars’ rise — from club experiment to hosting SEC opponents at Ladd-Peebles — became one of the fastest in modern college football. The students of the early 1980s, it turns out, got there first.