There is a curious parallel between the shocking victory of Donald Trump and 2016 and that of the University of Alabama in the 1926 Rose Bowl.  Does the paradigm shift that began 90 years ago foreshadow what is to come for the Trump movement?

In his Wall Street Journal article "How the South Conquered Football," Andrew Beaton describes how the South came to dominate college football.  And dominate it does.  Ten of the last 11 national championships were won by schools below the Mason-Dixon line.  And the Southeastern Conference is the most feared in college football, although the Big Ten with Urban Myer (Ohio State) and Jim Harbaugh (Michigan) is now starting to make its presence felt.

It wasn't always so.  Beaton traces the rise of Southern football prowess to the 1926 Rose Bowl game between Alabama and Washington.  Up until then, the Southern teams were not taken seriously.  Indeed, prior to offering the invitation to Alabama, organizers of that Rose Bowl had their offers to play Washington rejected by Dartmouth, Colgate, Michigan, and Princeton.  The low choice Alabama accepted but was given no chance to win.  The Crimson Tide was considered laughable.  Will Rogers referred to Alabama as "Tusca-losers."

The University of Washington powerhouse was the odds-on favorite.  It "entered the game with 34 wins and just three losses in the previous four seasons. In this 1925 seasons, the Huskies had gone undefeated (with one tie) and outscored their opponents 461-39."

But things did not turn out as expected.  After falling behind 12-0 at halftime, scrappy Alabama stormed back to win 20-19.

It is hard to imagine today, but this upset electrified the entire South.  Throughout the area, that game "was hailed as a cultural triumph in a poverty-stricken region where the bitterness of the Civil War still lingered."  Football became a point of Southern pride, an endeavor to be taken up with all seriousness.  The president of Auburn University, a man who had earlier poo-pooed football, was dismissed as one Southern school after another began to establish dominance in the game.

I think you can see where this is going.

In the 2016 campaign cycle, underdog Donald Trump slugged it out against his numerous and highly touted Republican opponents.  From the beginning to the end of the primaries, all the so-called experts were predicting a Trump implosion.  It never happened, as Trump handily won the GOP nomination – his conference title, if you will.

Then came the general election – the bowl game to decide the national champion.

Again, Trump was treated as a joke.  The overwhelming favorite in the election was Hillary R. Clinton.  Heaven knows, this woman had been preparing for this election (game) for years and had the campaign financing advantage in spades.  And Mrs. Clinton had the media in her purse, so much so that the some of the drive-bys went beyond their usual biased coverage to essentially become active participants in the Clinton campaign.  One example is two covers of Time magazine in August and October of this year, which showed a caricature of Trump melting away.  This "fake news" was designed to dispirit supporters of Donald Trump and to deter the fence-sitters from even thinking of voting for him.

The kindest thing the media said about Donald Trump was that he was unpresidential.  The more common impression given was that Trump was a fool, a clown, a racist, a male chauvinist, and a buffoon. 

Adding to the Democrat advantage was the fact that a some of those in the GOP establishment (i.e., Trump's own teammates) were either actively or passively working against their party's nominee.  This was unprecedented.

But like underdog Alabama in the 1926 Rose Bowl, Trump came from behind to win the 2016 presidency.  Alabama's upset over Washington those many years ago galvanized the South and set it on the path to college football prominence that extends to today.  It remains to be seen, however, if Trump's victory will do the same for his America-first agenda.

So far, things look promising.

It is more than just that the president-elect's cabinet picks are people who are committed to cutting the Washington, D.C. Leviathan down to a size more suitable to a constitutional republic than an overbearing centralized state.  Once power is taken from the bureaucrats in D.C. and returned to the individual states and the people, it could be quite a difficult task for the Democrats to re-centralize it.

In the past, the dictates of political correctness and the opinion of the liberal media have been effectively used to whip Republican candidates and officeholders to toe a more or less progressive line domestically and a globalist one internationally.  To date, Trump has shown that he's immune to those poisons.  Just the fact alone that Trump survived constant and vicious assaults by thought police in the media can only spur more people to copy him.

It impossible to predict the future.  But the election of Trump and how he managed to pull it off could well trigger a true paradigm shift similar to the one that led to rise of Southern football programs after 1926.