Today's Tidbit... Player Transfers: What's Old Is New Again

We think of mass transfers and players following their coaches to new destinations as a condition of the 2020s, brought on by the portal and the one-time transfer provision. But college football witnessed mass transfers after both WWI and WWII. Thankfully, we did not need a world war to encourage a flood of transfers this time around, but it's worth looking back on how transfers benefited a first-time college head coach, Lt. Cmdr. Paul "Bear" Bryant, in 1945.

Bryant, of course, played end at Alabama opposite Don Hutson. He then assisted at Union (TN), Alabama, and Vanderbilt before accepting the head job at Arkansas. However, Pearl Harbor changed his plans when he enlisted in the Navy. He spent 1942 as an assistant football coach with the University of Georgia Pre-Flight Skycrackers, one of several university-based naval programs that provided classroom training to future aviators. The pre-flight schools had major-college quality athletic programs that operated parallel to the varsity programs at those schools.

Bryant spent 1943 aboard an Army Transport ship, the S.S. Uruguay, traveling in the Mediterranean and Atlantic. He then transferred to the University of North Carolina Pre-Flight Cloudbusters as an assistant coach for the 1944 season. He became head coach in February 1945 when his boss transferred elsewhere.