Back When: The game they erased from history

UAB 75, Albany-Turner 0 — Nov. 2, 1991. Legion Field.

They say the 1991 UAB Blazers went 4-3-2. They say they played nine games that first season as an NCAA Division III program. They say Pat Green didn't run for 195 yards on a frosty Saturday night at Legion Field. They say Derrick Ingram didn't catch a 59-yard touchdown pass. They say a 347-pound fullback didn't line up behind the quarterback and score against his former team.

But I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. I even wrote about it in the school newspaper.

This is the story of the most lopsided victory in UAB football history. Unofficially, of course.

The official record says 4-3-2. Nine games. But UAB won five games that year, not four. The fifth win — a 75-0 rout of something called Albany-Turner — was quietly removed because Albany-Turner wasn't a college. It was a federally funded job-training center in Albany, Georgia — now known as Turner Job Corps — that fielded a club football team. No NCAA classification. No NAIA classification. The game couldn't count.

UAB advertised it in the Birmingham News. Tickets through Fastix. Adults five dollars, children three. The first 1,000 kids through the gate received free UAB footballs, courtesy of WBMG-TV 42 and The RIME Companies. The Post-Herald ran a preview. Two Birmingham News staff writers covered it. This was a fully marketed, ticketed event — and the university later pretended it never happened.

I was a senior staff writer at the Kaleidoscope, UAB's student newspaper. I covered this game. I also shot photos for the athletic department and worked with the football team as a student-assistant in the sports information office. I knew the coaching staff and the players. Some even lived next door to me in the dorm.

Thirty-five years later, what happened on that Saturday night remains one of the strangest chapters in UAB football history.

UAB entered the game 2-3-2 and had just lost to undefeated Ferrum 35-7. Jim Hilyer's team needed a win at home, where the Blazers were 0-2-1 at Legion Field.

"We'd like to win one for our fans," Hilyer told the Post-Herald before the game. "They've been very supportive of us, and we want to reward them with a victory."

The Post-Herald's Cary Estes was more direct about what was coming. His headline read, "UAB gets rare role of favorite." His lede: "For the first and probably only time this season, the UAB Blazers are overwhelming favorites to win a football game."

Estes described Albany-Turner as "a Georgia trade school that is at about the same level today that the Blazers were at two years ago when they played their first season as a club team." He added that Albany-Turner "has not come close to winning a game this season. In fact, the school is struggling simply to field a team."

Estes wasn't wrong.

Albany-Turner probably didn't have 40 players. The Wildcats' equipment was ragged. Their uniforms didn't match. Some of them looked like college students. Some of them looked like they might still have been in junior high. You could see the mismatch during warmups.

The day before the game, the Birmingham News ran a feature on UAB offensive lineman Robert Mallory, who had played at Albany-Turner before transferring to UAB. The reporter, Larry Shoufit, described Albany-Turner as a program where the football team "changes its personnel almost every year." Mallory was a 6-foot-2, 347-pound guard from Alabama who had played defense at Albany-Turner before moving to the offensive line at UAB. The story treated the game as a standard preview.

What neither preview mentioned was the coaching staff on UAB's sideline.

UAB's offensive coordinator was Dieter Brock. They called him "The Birmingham Rifle." He played at Jacksonville State, then quarterbacked the Winnipeg Blue Bombers for a decade. He is a CFL Hall of Famer. In 1985, he started for the Los Angeles Rams and took them to the NFC Championship Game. He was in his first year at UAB, the start of a four-year run as offensive coordinator.

The running backs coach was Joe Cribbs — All-Pro running back out of Auburn, three-time Pro Bowl selection with the Buffalo Bills, former Birmingham Stallion in the USFL and a member of the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame.

The offensive line coach was Bill McClung, who played at Carson-Newman, spent time with the Denver Broncos and Green Bay Packers and played in the USFL for the Chicago Blitz and Denver Gold.

A first-year Division III program with a CFL Hall of Famer calling plays, an All-Pro NFL running back coaching the backs and a former pro lineman coaching the line. Hilyer's staff was loaded with former pros who had ties to Birmingham. They ran a CFL-style offense and threw the ball more than most Division III programs would have dreamed of.

They were about to turn all of that loose on a job-training center from south Georgia.

UAB led 21-0 barely eight minutes into the game.

Pat Green opened the scoring on a 9-yard run, then was met by three Albany-Turner defenders near the 5-yard line and bulldozed his way through them into the end zone to complete a 35-yard touchdown run. Robert Porter scored on a 40-yard run around left end. Chris Bradford hit Derrick Ingram on a 59-yard touchdown pass. It was 42-0 at halftime.

UAB finished with 585 yards of total offense. Albany-Turner had 13 yards and two first downs.

In the second half, Hilyer emptied the bench. Every Blazer in uniform saw the field. Nine different players scored touchdowns. Three backup quarterbacks — Bradford, James Ferguson and George Sides — threw touchdown passes.

And then Mallory got his moment.

The 347-pound offensive guard was moved to fullback and scored on a 4-yard run against the team he used to play for.

"After a while I kind of felt sorry for them," UAB wide receiver Manuel Philpott said after the game. "We knew it would probably end up a blowout, and we really didn't try to run it up on them but it just happened."

Then Philpott said what everybody at Legion Field already knew.

"It's kind of like my high school coach used to say: 'If you're going to kill a gnat, you might as well hit it with a hammer.'"

In the second half, with the game long decided, UAB hit a bomb downfield. On the sideline, Brock and McClung got into a shouting match over the call. Brock's answer was the same one Hilyer had been giving all night.

"I can't ask my backups not to run our plays."

At one point, a UAB player hit the Albany-Turner quarterback so hard — helmet to sternum — that I was afraid the kid might have died on the field.

That's the kind of game it was.

The Birmingham News headline the next morning: "Blazers have a blast in rout of club foe." The word "club" told you everything the game story confirmed. Troy Johnson wrote it plainly: "Although the Blazers beat a team that hasn't received NCAA or NAIA classification, the game served an important purpose said UAB coach Jim Hilyer."

"We weren't trying to embarrass them," Hilyer told the Birmingham News. "You can't send in your second and third stringers and tell them not to play well or try hard. We have a very positive relationship with Albany-Turner. They are trying to establish their program and they need to play games. That's the only way they can get better."

At some point after the season, the game was removed from UAB's official records. There was no announcement; the score just disappeared. The stats disappeared. Pat Green's 195 rushing yards — which to this day would rank just outside UAB's top 10 for a single-game performance — vanished. The game removal took a 1,000-yard season off the board for Green. His official 1991 statistics do not include November 2.

The record changed from 5-3-2 to 4-3-2. Ten games became nine.

Except it didn't stay that way.

At some point — quietly, without explanation — UAB restored the game to its official schedule on uabsports.com. The 1991 season page now lists 10 games and an overall record of 5-3-2. Albany-Turner is there: November 2, 1991, home, Birmingham.

Wikipedia still shows nine games and 4-3-2.

The game is back on the schedule. The stats are not. Pat Green's 195-yard night and the 1,000-yard season that went with it are still erased. Robert Mallory's first collegiate touchdown does not appear in any statistical record.

What happened on a cold night at Legion Field on November 2, 1991, lives only in newspaper clippings and in the memories of now middle-aged men who were there.