The two schools played each other for the first time on 22 February 1893, at Lakeview Park in Birmingham. Alabama record it as the last game of their 1892 season; Auburn record it as the first of their 1893 season. Both schools are right, and the archive keeps it under 1892 for that reason.
Two programmes barely a year old
Football reached both campuses through one man each. At Auburn it was George Petrie, a Montgomery-born historian who had taken his doctorate at Johns Hopkins between 1889 and 1891 and come home in love with a game that had barely travelled south. He organised Auburn’s first team in 1891 and coached it in 1892. He was not, however, on the sideline for this game: Petrie resigned as coach in December 1892, citing his academic work, and D. M. Balliet led Auburn against Alabama.
At Alabama the equivalent figure was a student. William G. Little had encountered the game at school in the north-east, brought equipment back with him, and got a team organised in 1892. E. B. Beaumont was the first coach. Little captained the side that played this game.
Why 32-22 was a lot of points
Under the rules of the 1890s a touchdown was worth four points, the kick after it two, and a field goal five. A converted touchdown therefore came to six, the same total as today, but assembled from different parts. Fifty-four combined points in February 1893 represented a great deal of scoring for a sport in which a low-scoring struggle was the norm and the forward pass did not yet exist.
Auburn won 32-22. Rufus Dorsey and Tom Daniels were Auburn’s captains that season.
What it started
The two schools have now played 90 times. This was the first, and it was not called the Iron Bowl — that name belongs to the twentieth century, and to Birmingham’s identity as a steel city rather than to anything anyone said in 1893. What the day did establish was that the fixture would be played in Birmingham, on neutral ground, in front of a crowd drawn from the whole state. That arrangement lasted, with interruptions, for the next ninety-six years.