Auburn’s third consecutive win in the series was also the most productive attacking performance either side had produced in the rivalry for more than half a century.
The burst
Auburn scored four touchdowns on five plays in the middle of the game, a sequence that effectively finished the contest before Alabama had scored. Howell Tubbs ran for one touchdown and threw two to Jerry Elliott, and Billy Cook ran in another just after half-time. Billy Kitchens recovered a fumble in the Alabama end zone for a fifth score. Bobby Hoppe carried eight times for 112 yards — an average of 14 yards a carry — and Auburn finished with 489 yards of total offence. Tubbs threw for 102 of them. Billy Atkins intercepted Alabama quarterback Bobby Smith.
A crowd of 44,000 was at Legion Field on 1 December 1956.
The most in 56 years
Thirty-four points was the most Auburn had scored against Alabama since 1900, when the Tigers won 53-5 in an era with different rules, different scoring values and a different game. In the twentieth-century series to that point, nothing had come close.
Two directions
Alabama finished 2-7-1 in Whitworth’s second season. It was an improvement on the winless year only in the narrowest arithmetical sense, and the pressure on the programme was becoming impossible to contain; Whitworth would get one more year. Auburn finished 7-3, a step back from the previous season’s ranked finish, and went into 1957 with Tubbs, Elliott, Atkins and a defence that was about to become the best in the country.