Roll 'Bama Roll, an Alabama Crimson Tide community

Bear Bryant probably should have been jailed for the brutal practices he put his players through; 76 players quit the team one year.

I’ve had a full life in one respect, but I’ve had a one-track deal in another respect. Whether it’s been good, I’ll never know. That’ll be decided by wiser men later. My life has been so tied up in football that it has flow by. I wish it wasn’t that way, but it had gone by mighty fast. Practice, recruiting, games. Football, football and more football. There hasn’t been much else. It has become a void, as it has to when your next minute, next hour and next day all revolve around one thing. Frankly, I don’t know if that’s good. I know I’ve made a journey, but I’m not sure I’ve enjoyed all of it. You miss a lot of things you shouldn’t miss…

Jim Carlen, who followed [Gene] Corum at WVU in 1966, was a young defensive assistant on Bobby Dodd’s Georgia Tech staff in the early 1960s. He once found himself in a room with Dodd and Alabama coach Bear Bryant when the two coaching legends were talking about the passing game.

"They would talk about throwing like it was a disease," Carlen said.

But the shovel play itself has been around for a long time. Compare the video of Florida this year with the video of Bryant's Crimson Tide below. All things are cyclical.

Recruiting is the one thing I hate. I won't do it unless my coaches tell me I've just got to. The whole process is kind of undignified for me and the young man.