Auburn won 17-0 at Tuscaloosa on 15 November 1901, their second victory on the Alabama campus and their second consecutive shutout of the series.
Sloan’s two
Matt Sloan scored twice for Auburn in the first half, and that was effectively the game. Under the scoring then in force — five for a touchdown, one for the kick after, five for a field goal — seventeen points does not resolve into a single obvious combination, and no complete account of the afternoon survives. What is recorded is that Auburn scored in the first half through Sloan and that Alabama did not score at all.
Both coaches were again new: William M. Williams for Auburn, M. S. Harvey for Alabama. Henry S. Park captained Auburn. Earl Drennen captained Alabama for a second year.
The turnover on the sideline
Both head coaches in this game were in their first season, and neither lasted long. That was normal. Across the fifteen years the two schools played each other before the break, most coaches on either side stayed a single year; the exceptions are John Heisman’s five seasons at Auburn and Mike Donahue’s long run after 1904. The teams that took the field were being assembled and re-taught annually, which is part of why the results in this period swing so widely from one season to the next.
The ledger after six games
Auburn had won five of the first six, and the cumulative score across those six meetings stood at Auburn 190, Alabama 61. Their next win, a 23-0 shutout in Birmingham in 1902, would make it three in a row and the third consecutive year Alabama failed to score.
Alabama’s answer came in 1903, and it was the last time either side won three straight in this series for twenty years.