Long before Alabama — and now Clemson — rose as proud football powers, the 1899 University of the South football team, familiarly known as the Sewanee Tigers, provided a blueprint for Southern college football domination.

Alabama and Clemson would surely crush the Tigers, but the copyright for how to dominate an era of college football would probably belong to Sewanee, not Alabama or its opponent in Monday night’s national championship game, Clemson.

The idealization of the football player in the South?

The idea of tying a Southern university’s identity to football? They go back at least as far as Sewanee. The pursuit of money to keep a college football program greased for greatness? That is another trademark at least 119 years old.

The Crimson Tide can capture their sixth national title in 10 years with a win over Clemson on Monday in Santa Clara, California. Clemson beat Alabama two years ago, and this is the third time the two teams have met for the championship in four years.

But Sewanee, Tennessee, a small town on the Cumberland Plateau, created the template for the flush, modern, Southern football powerhouse, and it has been used time and again in the past 60 years, reaching its apotheosis at Alabama under coach Nick Saban.

Sewanee was led by one of the first forward thinkers of Southern football, Luke Lea (pronounced Lee), its 22-year-old team manager. The equivalent of an athletic director today, Lea put together a five-game, six-day, 2,300-mile trip by train through the South because he needed money to finance the 1899 team, and barnstorming was the only way to get it.

While most college teams were playing four or five games a season, Sewanee played 12. Lea scheduled moneymaking games against the University of Texas and Texas A&M at the front end of the trip and games with Tulane, Louisiana State and the University of Mississippi on the back end.

“Luke Lea’s canniness and caginess is what made that program possible,” said Woody Register, a history professor at the University of the South who has researched the 1899 team. “It connects him to generations of program designers.”

Lea, who became a U.S. senator at age 32, is considered the first to come up with the idea of having trainers on road trips to take care of the players and massage their weary legs back into playing shape. He created a team that was a merciless bully: The Tigers were 12-0 and outscored opponents, 322-10.

Sewanee could not pass the football, as per the rules of the day, and it would be no match for Alabama or Clemson. The team was also entirely white. The first African-American student to graduate from Sewanee, Nathaniel Owens, entered in 1966 and graduated in 1970. He was an outstanding football player.

Nonetheless, Norman Jetmundsen Jr., a Birmingham lawyer who is putting together a documentary on the Sewanee team, is certain that today’s elite teams would be impressed with the Tigers.

“They played 35 consecutive minutes a half on both sides of the ball with no substitution, and they played with serious injuries,” Jetmundsen said. “They played five games in six days on that train trip and won them all by shutout. Who wouldn’t be impressed by that?”

In a chapter of a book on the history of Sewanee, Register wrote that the 1899 team “formed part of the university’s heritage.” He said that, in particular, Benjamin Lawton Wiggins, the university’s vice chancellor at the time, rallied students around the notion that football should be a part of the Southern male’s identity.

At the time, the South was desperate for cheer, and Sewanee’s success was seen as a response to the aristocratic Northerners of the day, who thought they owned the game. Football was something Southerners could excel at, especially in the aftermath of defeat in the Civil War and economic depression, said George Rable, a U.S. historian.

“The 1890s were a rough time for the nation economically, but especially for the South,” Rable said. “Football provided some comfort and sense of achievement.”

When the Southeastern Conference was created in 1932, Sewanee was a charter member, even though its days of being a powerhouse were long over. Inclusion was a tribute to the 1899 Tigers, a team for which Alabama’s Saban is a worthy descendant.

Saban was the first coach in the SEC to consistently adopt a season-opening game in a neutral, big city for money and exposure when Alabama played Clemson in Atlanta in 2008. Now, marquee matchups at the start of the season are a regular occurrence across college football. Saban is also the primary fundraiser for football facilities on campus, which are among the best nationally. He knows what Lea knew: Success requires money.

“There is a connection between then and now, because there is a significant money element at the center of the sport, and money is an unavoidable element of the game of college football,” Register said. “To have a mighty program, and be the champions of the South, which was their real aspiration, that required money.”

Saban has been a catalyst for football programs, Clemson among them, to add layers and layers of support personnel, more than a century after Sewanee added trainers. And the Crimson Tide (13-0) are as merciless as they come. They outscored opponents by 33.1 points a game this season, the biggest margin in the country. Clemson was second at 30.6.