Cecil “Hootie” Ingram, the former Alabama football star who later became athletics director, has died. He was 90.
Ingram’s death was confirmed to AL.com by Tommy Ford, a longtime Alabama athletics department staffer and close friend of the Ingram family. Funeral services are set for Saturday at Calvary Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa, with visitation from 10 a.m.-11:30 a.m.
“We will miss Hootie dearly,” Alabama athletics director Greg Byrne said via a post on Twitter/X. “He was such a wonderful man and always greeted you with a big smile. Hootie left a lasting impact on The University of Alabama as both a student-athlete and administrator. Our condolences go out to his family and friends.”
Born Sept. 2, 1933, in Tuscaloosa, Ingram signed with Alabama in 1951 after a multi-sport career at Tuscaloosa High School. He was an All-SEC defensive back as a sophomore in 1952, when he set a conference record with 10 interceptions.
Ingram added an interception and an 80-yard punt return in the Crimson Tide’s season-ending 61-6 victory over Syracuse in the Orange Bowl, the most lop-sided postseason win in program history. He also played baseball during his Alabama career, which began without much hesitation after being offered a scholarship by longtime assistant coach Hank Crisp.
“Alabama didn’t have to recruit me,” Ingram told author Kirk McNair for the 2005 book What It Means to Be Crimson Tide. “I had been practicing to be an Alabama player since I was in about the fourth grade. And I spent a lot of time on the Alabama practice fields watching as a kid. I got letters from other schools, but I was never going anywhere else.
“One day during basketball season, coach Crisp asked me when I was going to sign. I told him I didn’t know I had an offer. He told me to come by his office the next day, which I did. He then sent me to coach Lew Bostick’s office to sign the scholarship. Coach Bostick told me it was out on the table, to fill it out and sign it. And I did. Years later when I was working for the Southeastern Conference, I went back in the files and found my scholarship papers that I had filled out myself.”
Ingram played one season (1955) as a defensive back with the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles before going into coaching. He coached on the high school level at Brookwood and Tuscaloosa County before joining the college ranks as an assistant at Wake Forest in 1960.
Ingram also coached at Virginia Tech (then VPI), Georgia and Arkansas before becoming head coach at Clemson in 1970. His Tigers went just 12-21 in three seasons before he left to join the Southeastern Conference office as associate commissioner.
Ingram stayed with the SEC until 1981, when he became athletics director at Florida State. He remained with the Seminoles until 1989, when he returned to his alma mater to replace Steve Sloan, who died just last month at age 79.
Cecil "Hootie" Ingram was an All-SEC defensive back in 1952, when he set a conference record with 10 interceptions. (Photo courtesy of the Paul W. Bryant Museum)Paul W. Bryant Museum
During his AD tenure at Alabama, Ingram was most famous for hiring Gene Stallings as head football coach prior to the 1990 season. An unpopular hire at the time due to Stallings’ poor record at Texas A&M and with the NFL’s Phoenix Cardinals, the former Alabama assistant under Paul “Bear” Bryant and Dallas Cowboys assistant under Tom Landry went on to win 70 games in seven seasons, including the 1992 national championship.
“I had known Gene Stallings when he was an assistant at Alabama and when he was at Texas A&M, and I knew he had done a great job for coach Bryant and coach Landry,” Ingram told McNair. “I knew he could take the heat and do the job, and that’s why I chose him. I think (school president Roger) Sayers may have been skeptical, but he wasn’t after he met Gene. And I don’t think we could have gotten anyone who could have done a better job. And we got along great, maybe because we were both pretty ornery, two hard-headed people working together.”
Ingram remained Alabama’s AD until 1995, when he resigned after the school was placed on NCAA probation for the first time. Former Crimson Tide defensive back Antonio Langham had illegally received $400 from an agent after the 1992 season, but Stallings (with Ingram’s authorization) improperly allowed him to keep playing while the school investigated.
Alabama football was hit with major scholarship reductions after the NCAA case involving Langham (which also included an impermissible loan given to former Crimson Tide running back Gene Jelks in the late 1980s), banned from postseason play in 1995 and forced to forfeit eight victories in which Langham had played in 1993. Years later, Ingram told AL.com he believed his department had handled the Langham case properly at the time.
“Well it was just a situation where it somebody’s word against somebody else’s word,” Ingram said. “The wrong people won. The information that we had, the signed statements we had from people, it was ruled in another way. That was water under the dam. I never look back on anything like that. You have something like that happen, you’ve just got to close ranks and move on.”
Ingram remained in the Alabama athletic department for a time after stepping down as AD, overseeing the expansion of Bryant-Denny Stadium that was completed in 1998. He continued to live in the Tuscaloosa area until his death.
Ingram is the third prominent former Alabama player to die in recent weeks, along with Sloan and Clell Hobson Sr., a Crimson Tide teammate of Ingram’s in the early 1950s. Clell Hobson died March 14 at age 93.