Bryant on Neyland.....
My trouble coaching against Tennessee - specifically, against General Neyland - was that every time we played I went out there like a wild man and changed everything around. One year we painted all the dummies orange, then took the team out to a horse farm, and brought the clergy in, and had everybody so tight they could barely move. Next day we lost 6-0. We had a lot of gimmicks and I threw out all the things we could do, the good plays, and put in something new, For Neyland.
Robert Reese Neyland was his full name. He had been schooled at West Point, and had won the Distinguished Service Medal as an aid to General MacArthur. As a football coach he was a model of consistency. He always did the same thing, and he always won. He was more of Coach Thomas's era than mine, but he was a giant and the respect (or dread) Coach Thomas had for him carried over to me. Neyland stuck with the single wing all his football life. People called his offense "the covered wagon," but like Hank Crisp used to say, "Try and stop it."
They used to kid me around the office that anytime Tennessee was mentioned during a coffee break I had to excuse myself and be sick. They weren't far wrong. I lost my breakfast regularly before the Tennessee game. Everybody thought Neyland had a jinx on us. It was no jinx. He was a better coach, and he had better football players - and I couldn't stand it. We managed a couple of ties against him, but I never beat him. He retired after the 1952 season."
[BEAR,The Hard Life and Good Times of Alabama's Coach Bryant, page 105]
All of Coach Bryant's losses to General Neyland were while he was at Kentucky from 1946 - 1953. He went to Texas A&M in 1954. He arrived at the Capstone, his alma mater, in 1958.
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