A12| Friday, September 13, 2019 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
SINCE DABO SWINNEYwon his
first national title at Clemson in
January 2017, only two teams have
managed to defeat the Tigers. One
of them, Alabama, is not a surprise,
given that the Tide are themselves
a dynastic juggernaut.
The other is, surprisingly, Syra-
cuse. Not one of college football’s
major powers, Syracuse is often not
very good at football. Last weekend,
they were shellacked 63-20 by un-
heralded Maryland.
Yet in October 2017 at the Car-
rier Dome, then-second-year coach
Dino Babers’s team knocked off the
Tigers 27-24. It would be the Or-
ange’s fourth and final win of the
season.
Underdogs still in 2018, an im-
proved Orange team marched into
Death Valley and nearly defeated
Clemson again. Syracuse led for
most of the game until the final 41
seconds, when Clemson’s star run-
ning back Travis Etienne capped a
comeback drive with a touchdown
to give the Tigers a 27-23 win.
As Syracuse prepares to host
Clemson again on Saturday, the rest
of college football may wonder:What does Dino Babers know that
other coaches don’t? The answer
may be tournament chess.
Babers learned chess in third
grade and started competing in
tournaments in middle school. In an
interview with The Wall Street
Journal, he said that playing chess
on the clock taught him the value of
speed, a principle he has since co-
opted for his offense.“Once you hit the clock, if the
opponent hasn’t moved by the time
the clock moves, you get to have
two moves in a row, which is a huge
advantage,” said Babers of the
board game. “We kind of play foot-
ball that way.”
Ever since his first season as a
head coach at Eastern Illinois Uni-
versity in 2012, Babers’s teams have
played ridiculously fast, averagingFROM TOP: ASSOCIATED PRESS; GETTY IMAGES; ANNIE LAURIE WILLIAMS PAPERS/RARE BOOK & MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITYHarper Lee Also Wrote About
Alabama Football
SPORTS
The world was waiting for the next
Harper Lee novel. She was busy
writing a letter about Bear Bryant
and Alabama football. ‘I was a rabid
football fan long before I was a
writer,’ she once said.The author of “To Kill
a Mockingbird”
watched every
Crimson Tide game
and wrote letters
about Bear Bryant—
including this one
O
n a pleasant evening in
the spring of 1963, the
world’s most famous
author felt inspired to
write. The pages that
came from her typewriter would be
saved for decades with a note in
blue ink: “Wonderful letter from
Nelle Harper Lee.”
It had been three years since the
publication of “To Kill a Mocking-
bird,” and several months since the
release of the movie adaptation,
when the young Pulitzer Prize win-
ner found herself preoccupied with
another deeply Southern topic.
At the moment when it must have
felt like everyone in her life was
waiting to read anything else she
had written, Harper Lee finally had
something to write about: the Ala-
bama Crimson Tide football team.
She was working with rich mate-
rial. Lee had become transfixed by a
scandal that appeared to implicate
the legendary Alabama coach Bear
Bryant—a story rife with corrup-
tion, bias, rivalry, peculiarities of
state politics, moral quandaries and
a healthy dose of the absurd. This
was the essence of college football
captured in one neat letter. And it
happened to be written by a great
American novelist who typed her
name and return address on the
back of the envelope:“Lee
Monroeville
Alabama”Harper Lee might not be the first
Alabaman who comes to mind as
someone who loved Alabama’s foot-
ball team. In fact she might be the
last. But as she once put it: “I was a
rabid football fan long before I was
a writer.”
Like most rabid fans, she
watched every Alabama game. Un-
like most of her kind, she once
skipped the Cannes Film Festival to
meet Bryant. “Bear talked about lit-
erature, and I talked about foot-
ball,” Lee said at the time. She was
so interested in hearing people talk
about football that she even lis-
tened to ESPN host Paul Finebaum’s
radio show.
“I would say it wasn’t an interest
but a passion,” said Tonja Carter,
her attorney. “Most of the fall
schedule was built around watching
the games on TV.”
This passion was such a powerful
force in the lives of Nelle Harper
and Alice Lee that the sisters pur-
chased their first television in part
because they had to watch football.
Alice died in 2014 and Nelle Harper
in 2016, and they remained fans as
Nick Saban restored the Crimson
Tide to glory.
“I have heard that she was,” Sa-
ban said, “but I never had the op-
portunity to have any interactions
with her.”
The Lees were a family divided
when it came to football. Alice (who
happened to be nicknamed “Bear”)
and Nelle Harper went to Alabama.
Their siblings went to Auburn. “The
sisters were very funny about their
love for Alabama,” Carter said.
“They would cheer for both teams
until they played each other. Then
they were 100% Alabama fans.” (As
for Carter’s allegiances, she added:
“ROLL TIDE!!!!”)Bear Bryant was busy winning
national championships in the
1960s as Harper Lee was becoming
phenomenally successful herself.
She famously wouldn’t publish an-
other book for more than a half-
century—and it turned out to be
one that was written before “To Kill
a Mockingbird.” But for someone
who seemed reclusive, Lee was
never a recluse. The great paradox
of this author who went silent be-
tween 1960 and 2015 is that she
was a prolific writer of letters. You
just had to know her to read her.
The former
Auburn football
coach Pat Dye
found himself
on the receiv-
ing end of her
letters after
befriending
Lee near the
end of her life.
He’d read her
novel—“To Kill
a Blackbird,”
he once called
it—and
begged for an
introduction.
When they fi-
nally met, Dye was sufficiently im-
pressed. “You know, Nelle,” he said,
“you’re not really an obnoxious Ala-
bama fan.”
Dye and Lee fell into an unspo-
ken tradition when he visited her.
He would bring her a bag of choco-
lates and a bottle of whiskey. She
would write him a letter afterward.
“I got about 8-to-10 love letters
from her,” Dye said. And what do
they say? “Well, you don’t have to
share your letters,” he said.
“They’re private.”
But many of her letters have be-
come public, and they can be read
by anyone curious enough to find
them. Annie Laurie Williams and
Maurice Crain were literary agents
who donated their papers to Colum-
bia University’s Rare Book & Manu-
script Library, for example, and
their archives include correspon-
dence with Truman Capote, Marga-
ret Mitchell, John Steinbeck and a
series of letters from another one
of their favorite clients: Harper Lee.
“That Harper Lee was always
writing was obvious to anyone who
knew her, if only because they were
reminded whenever they opened
their mail,” Casey Cep writes in hernew book, “Furious Hours: Murder,
Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper
Lee,” which briefly quotes her foot-
ball letter. “Lee’s correspondence
constitutes its own archive, not
only of her life, the heres and
theres and sometimes the nowheres
of her adventures, but also of her
mind.”
On her mind on April 3, 1963
when she wrote to her literary
agents was the sort of bizarre saga
that would dominate Finebaum’s ra-
dio show today.
It all started with an article inthe Saturday Evening Post,
which is a very 1963 way to
begin a scandal. The story
was based on the account
of an Atlanta insurance
agent named George Bur-
nett. He had been trying to
place a long-distance call
in September 1962 when,
in an incredible twist of
fortune, he was acciden-
tally connected to a call
between Bryant and Georgia
athletic director Wally Butts. Bur-
nett couldn’t believe what he
claimed to be hearing: Butts sharing
Georgia’s strategy for its upcoming
game against Alabama with Bryant.
A week after the phone call, Ala-
bama beat Georgia, 35-0, and Bur-
nett was convinced he’d eaves-
dropped on the football equivalent
of insider trading.
Burnett passed along his con-
cerns to Georgia coach Johnny Grif-
fith,who already had a feeling that
someone had given Alabama his
playbook, and Butts resigned after
Griffith took the information to
school officials. The Saturday Eve-
ning Post published its blockbuster
story in March 1963. The men ad-mitted that they had spoken by
phone, but they denied the allega-
tion that they had conspired to rig
the game, and Butts immediately
sued the magazine’s parent com-
pany for $10 million.
By then the sordid libel case in-
volving this alleged scheme to fix
the Alabama vs. Georgia game had
captivated the South. And there
was one notable resident of Mon-
roeville paying close attention.
“The Wally Butts-Bear Bryant
thing is a lallapalooza & gets more
complicated every day,” Harper Lee
wrote to Williams and Crain. “I
hope the papers are giving it the
right coverage in New York but
doubt it.”There had been weeks of “ru-
mors, counterrumors, accusations,
boasts, speculations and seeping in-
nuendoes,” according to Sports Il-
lustrated later that summer, and
Harper Lee followed every part of
the brouhaha from her side of the
Chattahoochee River.
“What started out as most of the
Southeastern Conference patrons
cancelling their subscriptions to the
Satevepost has as of today erupted
into a major political scandal in
Georgia,” she wrote. But one part of
the story that didn’t quite make
sense to Lee and “people in these
parts” is why Butts would hand
Georgia’s secrets to a sworn enemy
such as Bryant. Then again she
wasn’t convinced that he did. As she
wrote: “We don’t know what Butts
said to Bryant on the telephone!”
Lee had two reasons to take Bry-
ant at his word when he denied the
allegations. The first was that she
was an Alabama fan. The second
was that she understood the impor-
tance of presuming innocence. “We
believe in our dear Bear
until he’s proven guilty,”
Lee wrote.
There was actually
one more reason to be-
lieve what she wanted to
believe about Bryant.
When a former Alabama
linebacker named Lee
Roy Jordan said that “as
far as he knows it ain’t
so,” Harper Lee trusted
him. She knew his fam-
ily. They were from the
next town over. “The
Jordans have a reputa-
tion for veracity in these
parts,” she wrote.
The lawsuit eventually made its
way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and
Butts won an unlikely 5-4 decision
in 1967, four years after Lee’s note
to her agents. It had been a long
time since she’d ended that letter
by asking Crain for an excuse to
send another one.
“This letter is twice as long as
anything you have ever written me,
and I’m not going to write another
word until you quit sitting in Bryant
Park girl-watching and spring-fever-
ing and WRITE.“Love to all,
Nelle.”
—Laine Higgins contributed to
this article.82.7 plays per game. By compari-
son, the median number of plays
per game among teams in the Foot-
ball Bowl Subdivision last season
was 69.8.
Before Babers arrived at Syra-
cuse in 2016, the Orange ran just
62.6 plays per game, 125th out of
130 FBS teams.
In the new coach’s first season,
Syracuse averaged 80.8 plays per
game. The offense has grown faster
still, last year reaching 81.2 plays
per game—third most in FBS foot-
ball.
“I think the tempo gives us an
edge,” said Babers. “The more plays
you run the more opportunities you
have to score points, and the more
points you score you have a better
opportunity to win.”
That thinking runs counter to
conventional wisdom in college
football, where high tempo offenses
are most commonly found at domi-
nant programs. Teams that are not
favored to win usually aim to run
fewer plays, creating fewer chances
to make mistakes that could turn
into points for their opponents.
The best way to understand why
Syracuse has been able to test
Clemson is by dissecting the team’slast meeting in 2018. Clemson’s de-
fensive line had overwhelmed oppo-
nents so thoroughly in its previous
six contests that the Tigers’ defense
hadn’t actually faced that many
snaps, about 65 per game. Then
came Syracuse, which ran 82 plays
in just over 27 minutes of posses-
sion time—25 more plays than
Clemson’s offense completed, in five
minutes and 42 seconds less time.
“We’re going to move as fast as
we can and we’re going to see if the
other team, which hasn’t been do-
ing that for 12 games, can adjust to
our style of play,” said Babers.
The success of Syracuse’s speedy
offense hinges on two factors: how
fast the slowest offensive lineman
can move and whether the quarter-
back can manage the offense with-
out huddling.
The first quarterback to get a
taste of the Babers system was
Jimmy Garoppolo, now a starter for
the San Francisco 49ers, who
played under the coach for two sea-
sons at Eastern Illinois.
“It was so fast,” recalled Garop-
polo. “It’s a quarterback’s dream of-
fense, honestly, and a receiver’s,
too, with how many times they get
opportunities to make plays.”BYLAINEHIGGINSBRETT CARLSEN/GETTY IMAGESThe Team That Beat Clemson by Turning Football Into Chess
Syracuse stunned then-No. 2 Clemson 27-24 at the Carrier Dome in 2017.BYBENCOHEN