Joe Namath is famous for guaranteeing the New York Jets' unexpected victory over the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, the high point of the quarterback's 13 seasons in the AFL and NFL.
"Broadway Joe" was the MVP of Super Bowl III as well as the AFL Player of the Year in 1968 and 1969. He joined the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985.
But before his pro accolades, Namath played for coach Paul "Bear" Bryant from 1962 through 1964 at Alabama.
Talking with Mike Francesa on WFAN in New York on Wednesday, Namath related how he went from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, to Tuscaloosa after Alabama assistant coach Howard Schnellenberger arrived at his home "unannounced."
"There was a knock on the door one day," Namath said. "I happened to be home, my mother and I, just the two of us in the house. Knock on the door. I went to the door unsuspecting. I opened it, and there was this big man there with a very deep voice, nearly as deep as coach Bryant's -- he favored coach Bryant in that category, too, and coaching as well. But he introduced himself. My mother came up behind me, and he introduced himself to my mother as being from the University of Alabama.
"What had happened was I didn't pass my college boards at the University of Maryland, and the coach there, Tom Nugent, knew coach Bryant. So he called coach Bryant, and coach Bryant immediately sent Howard north. Alabama had come to recruit me during the basketball season that year, and I wasn't even thinking about where I was going to go to school at that time.
"But my mother liked the way that Howard Schnellenberger presented himself and she wanted me to go to college. And by gosh, she went upstairs, packed a bag that you could put under the seat in front of you on an airplane and said, 'Here you are, coach. Go ahead and take him.' Gave me a five-dollar bill and said, 'Take him.'"
Namath said he wasn't taken with Bryant at first, but grew to appreciate the coach.
"That's one man I believe that we played for because we grew to love him," Namath said. "When we first met coach Bryant, he was hard, he was tough to understand, except he did tell us, my freshman class, he told us, 'Look, I'm going to teach ya'll how to keep from beating yourselves. We're going to win here, and you're going to learn how to keep from beating yourselves.' That sounded a little negative to me to start with. Coming from Pennsylvania, we won a championship. It sounded like playing scared, worrying about beating yourself.
"But to this day, you look at every football team professional or collegiate, most of the time the loser does a good job of beating themselves by making mistakes, mental errors, dropping the ball, missing tackles. And he was a stickler for the basics, practicing properly, preparation. Coach Bryant was wonderful."
The Crimson Tide posted a 29-4 record during Namath's three seasons on the varsity. The 1964 team finished No. 1 in the final Associated Press and coaches polls of the season.
But when asked by Francesa about games he remembered best from his college career, Namath came up with the losses -- a 7-6 defeat by Georgia Tech when the Tide was No. 1 in 1962, a 10-6 loss to Florida and a 10-8 loss to Auburn in 1963 and a 21-17 loss to Texas in the Orange Bowl in Namath's final college game.
"Coach Bryant told us this would happen when we looked back on our careers," Namath said. "He said we would remember the bad times more readily than we would remember the good ones, the losses more readily than we would remember the championship or the conference titles. And he was right on."
Mark Inabinett is a sports reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @AMarkG1.