Over the last three decades, Bear Bryant’s secrets to success during a six-championship run at Alabama have gone quite public.
For one, he switched to the Wishbone about halfway through his tenure. Secondly, he put his players through a grinding practice regimen that crafted them into football-playing machines (heard of the Junction Boys?).
But there is another ingredient in that winning formula of his: The Bear signed as many good players as he could even if he didn’t need them, just to keep them from joining his rivals. His philosophy: Why play against them? In fact in the 1960s, Bobby Dodd and Georgia Tech famously bolted the SEC in protest over Bryant signing as many as 45 players each year for a squad total that often approached 150.