Dubose invested heavily in the station, filling its schedule with strong first-run and off-network syndicated programming. The upstart station gained a major coup in the fall of 1985, when WDBB acquired the local broadcast television rights to the football and basketball coaches' shows of the Alabama Crimson Tide; prior to this, both Tide coaches' shows had aired on NBC affiliate WAPI-TV (channel 13, by then known as WVTM-TV), and before then, on WBRC. Although Birmingham was just barely large enough at the time to support two independent stations, WTTO and WDBB spent most of the first half of the 1980s in a pitched battle for rating supremacy.