Super Bowl 2024: Has an Alabama football player ever scored in the NFL championship?
Alabama football is arguably the preeminent college football program, a team more synonymous with the sport than any of its peers across the region and country.
The Crimson Tide has 18 claimed national championships, the most of any FBS program, and 965 all-time wins, the second-most in FBS history (behind only Michigan). The two FBS coaches who have won more than five national championships? Both of them, Nick Saban and Bear Bryant, coached at Alabama, combining for 12 titles over their respective tenures in Tuscaloosa (Saban's first title came at LSU in 2003).
Alabama’s on-field achievements can also be seen in what its players managed to accomplish after their time with the Tide was over.
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The Tide has eight former players in the Pro Football Hall of Fame — John Hannah, Don Hutson, Joe Namath, Ozzie Newsome, Ken Stabler, Bart Starr, Dwight Stephenson and Derrick Thomas — the most of any SEC program and tied for the seventh-most of any FBS program. The school has produced three NFL MVPs — Starr, Stabler and Shaun Alexander — though Namath, for his part, was the 1968 MVP of the American Football League.
But as the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs prepare to square off in the 2024 Super Bowl on Sunday at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, the biggest, most opulent event in American sports serves as a reminder of one glaring void on Alabama’s NFL resume.
Has an Alabama player ever scored in the Super Bowl?
As difficult as it is to believe, an Alabama player has never scored a point in the Super Bowl. With no former Tide players on the 49ers or Chiefs active rosters, it’s a streak that will continue for a 58th consecutive year.
Alabama, of course, has had an impact on the biggest game on the American sports calendar, with the first three Super Bowl MVPs having played their college ball in Tuscaloosa. Starr threw a combined three touchdowns in Super Bowls 1 and 2, which were won by his Green Bay Packers, and Stabler passed for a touchdown in the Oakland Raiders’ Super Bowl 11 victory.
No former Tide player, though, has reached the end zone themselves or split the uprights: an important distinction when discussing Alabama's scoring drought in the Super Bowl.
What was perhaps the best chance to end the drought over the past 20 years was in Super Bowl 40 in 2006, when Alexander entered the game as that year’s NFL MVP on the heels of a season in which he rushed for 1,880 yards and 27 touchdowns for the Seattle Seahawks. In a 21-10 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers, he rushed 20 times for 95 yards, but failed to cross the goal line.
It came close yet again last season, when Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts scored 20 points — three touchdown runs and a two-point conversion run — in his team’s loss to the Chiefs. However, despite beginning his career at Alabama and playing three seasons there, he entered the NFL out of Oklahoma, where he spent his final college season in 2019. As far as the NFL is concerned, he is a Sooner.
In that same Super Bowl, Hurts connected with former Alabama Heisman Trophy winner DeVonta Smith on a 45-yard pass, but Smith was ruled out just shy of the end zone, at the 2-yard line.
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Colleges with most points in the Super Bowl
While Alabama has never had a former player score in the Super Bowl, players from 143 different schools have managed the feat.
That large group includes some of the most decorated programs in the history of the sport and others as obscure as the Coast Guard Academy, which had former player Curt Knight kick an extra point in Super Bowl 7.
Here are the five colleges with the most points scored by former players in the Super Bowl:
1. Miami: 84 points
2. Florida: 82 points
3. Penn State: 81 points
T-4. Notre Dame: 66 points
T-4. Cal: 66 points
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Alabama football in the Super Bowl: Has a Crimson Tide player ever scored?
