
TUSCALOOSA, AL — In a quiet brick home just a mile from Bryant-Denny Stadium, 89-year-old Mabel “Mama Mae” Whitaker has been doing something that baffles both fans and statisticians: predicting every single Alabama Crimson Tide football win since 1975 — and getting it right.
That’s right. Mama Mae, as she’s known by everyone from former coaches to grocery clerks, has built an eerie reputation in West Alabama for correctly forecasting the outcome of Alabama games — not just wins and losses, but exact win totals in nearly every season for five decades.
“Back in ’75, Coach Bryant was still roaming the sidelines,” Mama Mae recalls, seated in her crimson rocker with a houndstooth shawl around her shoulders. “I told my husband before the season started, ‘We’ll lose two this year, win the rest, and beat Auburn by 10.’ And that’s exactly what happened. Folks started asking me every year after that.”
She’s been keeping a handwritten journal — still intact and shown proudly to reporters — with each season’s predictions written before opening kickoff. A local sports historian, David “Dee” Carson, who taught at the University of Alabama for 35 years, confirmed the accuracy.
“I’ve checked her notebooks against our records,” Carson says. “It’s uncanny. She’s only missed one game prediction — in 1997 — and even then, she corrected herself before kickoff, saying she had a ‘bad dream’ and changed it.”

She doesn’t claim psychic powers. “It’s not magic,” Mama Mae chuckles. “I just know football. And I know Bama. I look at their eyes, how the coaches talk in spring, what the boys eat on media day. God gives you senses if you know how to use them.”
The town started listening more closely around 2008, when she predicted an undefeated regular season in Nick Saban’s second year — and followed that up by accurately predicting each of the six national championships that followed.
When asked about Alabama’s future, Mama Mae leaned forward, whispering like it was sacred prophecy:
“There’s one more coming. Not this season, but the next one. We’ll have a stumble this year—two games, maybe—but that next squad? That’s a championship team. Just like ’09. Same feeling in my bones.”
Her grandson, Terrance Whitaker, a junior at UA studying sports medicine, has gone viral multiple times posting videos of her predictions to TikTok. “The crazy thing is, she’s never wrong,” he says. “People think it’s a joke until she nails it again and again.”
The Alabama Athletics Department even gave her honorary season tickets in 2019, recognizing her as a “Spiritual Advisor of the Tide.” Saban once joked in a press conference, “I should probably run the depth chart by Mama Mae before every game.”
With Facebook groups sharing her story under hashtags like #MamaMaeKnows and fan pages already calling her “The Oracle of the SEC,” it’s clear: this Tuscaloosa grandma isn’t just predicting football — she’s become part of Alabama lore.
And if you believe in legends, Mama Mae says the Tide isn’t done just yet. .