AUBURN, Ala. — Years before she was an award-winning journalist covering race and the South, Diane McWhorter was a student at Wellesley College, outside Boston. On Saturday afternoons in the fall, whenever she had the chance, she would watch nationally televised Alabama football games with friends. “I had to explain what a first down was,” she said.

These friends would cheer against the Crimson Tide, McWhorter said, because Alabama was “such an awful state,” a place only a few years removed from Jim Crow that had repeatedly elected the segregationist George Wallace as its governor.

But McWhorter, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for a book about the civil rights movement in her hometown of Birmingham, could not help herself. She rooted for the Tide.

“It was my redneck joy,” she said. “I loved the football team.”

The crosshatching of political and social developments against college football dominance has been a feature of Alabama life for nearly a century. The Crimson Tide’s emergence onto the national scene in the 1920s coincided with the Ku Klux Klan’s resurgence in the state. In the 1960s, football provided Alabamians a welcome point of pride during the tumult of the civil rights era.