Against the Tide mixes documentary film clips with interviews and commentary to tell the story of the 1970 Alabama-Southern Cal as a landmark in the history of integration. The film features recollections from former Alabama players Joe Namath, John Hannah, Scott Hunter, and John Mitchell, former Southern Cal players J.K. McKay (son of Coach John McKay), Charles Young, and Sam Cunningham, and others, including, for perspective, former New York Times editor and Alabama native Howell Raines. The result is a rare combination of great sports commentary and relevant socio-political history—but too often, Against the Tide gets too enthusiastic about the game's mythology at the expense of the facts.

It’s difficult to imagine that Bryant scheduled the Alabama-USC game in order to lose it. But he surely knew when he made the arrangements that his smaller, slower team stood little chance against the Trojans. Bryant’s thoughts, it seems, were of the future. Bryant, the public would learn years after that game, had been pushing for integration of the University of Alabama football team for years but found himself up against a brick wall named Governor George Wallace, a University of Alabama grad famous for his “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door”: an ugly occasion on which he tried to physically block black students from enrolling at the school. Bryant, whose winning teams had made him the most popular person in Alabama, was so determined that he threatened to run for political office—and though he did not say it, insiders were certain he could only have meant running for governor. He even invited Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and his wife for dinner in Tuscaloosa.

By the end of the 1960s, when Bryant and his staff had begun to reach out to the best black athletes, the top recruits wouldn’t even consider playing for the Crimson Tide. Alabama was even losing top football prospects within the state—like Davis—to out-of-state powers like Southern Cal.

But nothing less than the 42-21 trouncing that Southern Cal administered that day could have dragged Alabama’s diehard segregationists—some of whom, it was said, were on the University’s Board of Trustees—into the 20th century.

It did not, as one of Bryant’s former players, Jerry Claiborne, famously said, “do more for integration in Alabama in sixty minutes than Martin Luther King, Jr. did in 20 years.” But it did, as one Southern Cal player points out in Against the Tide, give the University of Alabama some religion when it came to recruiting football players. The next year, the Crimson Tide had a black varsity player: John Mitchell. Mitchell, the first black player to start for Alabama, later became the first black assistant coach at the University. Stories like Mitchell's began to crop up elsewhere in the South: Ozzie Newsome, Alabama’s All-American receiver in the mid-1970s, went on to become the first black general manager in the National Football League, and Sylvester Croom, a center, one of the first black stars Bryant recruited after the SEC game, later returned as an assistant coach at Alabama and, in 2004, became, at Mississippi State, the first black coach in the SEC.