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Courtesy of Clemson University

Former Clemson head coach Danny Ford, who led the Tigers to the only national title in school history in 1981, made his first trip to Clemson in 1967, as a player for the Alabama Crimson Tide. The Tigers and Tide will square off to open their 2008 campaigns on Saturday at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.

CLEMSON — Danny Ford remembers his first trip to Clemson like it was yesterday.

As a tight end for Alabama in 1967, his Crimson Tide rolled into Tigertown the Friday before and watched the junior varsity game between Clemson and Georgia Tech inside Death Valley before a scheduled practice, which followed soon after.

He noticed all the great things coming into town that make Clemson so special, such as the size of the school itself, the size of the town and the unique structures that surrounded the campus.

“I remember the dairy barn used to be right there on campus,” Ford recalled on Monday.

He also remembered how unique it was that then-head coaches Frank Howard and Paul “Bear” Bryant were good friends. But as for the Tigers themselves, Ford remembers he wasn’t very familiar with them at all.

In fact, the only thing Ford knew about the Clemson football team was based on what he saw as a junior varsity player the year before when Alabama beat the Tigers 26-0 in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Before that, the two programs had not met on the gridiron since 1936.

“We didn’t play them on a regular basis up until that 1966 year,” Ford said.

Ford and Alabama went on to win that game in 1967, 13-10, on their way to an 8-2-1 record and a No. 8 national ranking. The Tigers finished the year 6-4 and won their third consecutive ACC Championship at the time.

Ford and his Alabama team met the Tigers two more times after that with ’Bama winning both the 1968 and 1969 games by scores of 21-14 and 38-13. In 1975, a Bennie Cunningham-led Clemson team traveled to Tuscaloosa in late September and was thumped 56-0 by an Alabama squad that went 11-1 and finished No. 3 in the national polls.

Now, like during Ford’s playing days, the two programs will try to reintroduce themselves this Saturday night when ninth-ranked Clemson plays No. 24 Alabama (8 p.m., WLOS TV-13) in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome as part of the Chick-fil-A College Kickoff.

“Back when Coach Howard was there he had to play Alabama, Auburn and Georgia Tech to make money for their school,” Ford said. “Back in Coach Howard’s day they would play two or three SEC teams a year to make their finances work for the whole year and the majority of the time the SEC would win the football games, and then they come back and Coach Howard would go on and win the conference with something like a 6-4 or 7-3 kind of record.”

But things have since changed. Since Ford, who was the head coach at Clemson from 1979-’89, led the Tigers to the 1981 National Championship, Alabama has won just one of its 12 national titles and just three of its SEC leading 21 conference championships. Clemson dominated the ACC in the 1980s under Ford, winning the conference crown five times, while producing a 96-29-4 record in his 11 seasons as head coach.

In the 1990s, both programs slipped some. Clemson won its last ACC Championship in 1991 and hasn't come close since, and while Alabama has fared a little better with a National Championship in 1992 and SEC titles in ’92 and ’99, it's not the numbers Crimson Tide fans grew accustomed to under Bryant.

“There is no reason Alabama should be in the shape that they are in,” Ford said.

Ford watches both programs anxiously these days from his Pendleton home. The current Clemson program appears to be in the best shape it has been since his days of walking the sidelines at Memorial Stadium, while Alabama seems to be growing towards its national power roots that made it one of the more recognizable programs in the country.

“Clemson should be in the shape that they are,” he said. “They should be pretty good and Alabama should be good every year. They have a lot of built in advantages over people at some other schools, they have tradition and they have facilities and everything else. It’s a really, really good football state for high school football.”

Like everyone else, Ford has been listening to the so-called experts talk about this game for months now and he is anxious to see how it’s going to turn out. The thing he has found the most interesting about this game is how Clemson’s overall personnel appears to be better than Alabama’s

“It does sound kind of funny to hear Clemson’s personnel people are better than Alabama’s. I would have never thought that,” he said. “Even when we were playing, I have just always thought Alabama was a special place to be and always had a really, really special football program.”

Ford isn’t going to go to Atlanta this weekend because he says he’d much rather avoid the traffic if he can, so he will instead watch the game in Greenville with some of his close friends.

So, which team will he be pulling for?

“I’m in a situation where I really can’t lose,” he said. “If one wins, it will be good and I will probably be disappointed for the other one. If the other one wins, I guess I would be happy for them and disappointed for the other one.

“I really don’t have a favorite or whatever in this football game. Whichever one is the best football team will win. Hopefully, it’s a good football game.”