«[Last February, one of the first major decisions he had to make as coach was determining the fate of leading returning rusher Nick Turner , who?had?struggled academically and had plead guilty to passing counterfeit money. Croom ultimately dismissed Turner from the team but allowed him to keep his scholarship for the spring semester so he could leave the school in good academic standing.?] If a kid doesn't get that degree, it's going to affect him, his family, the kids he's going to have, ... That's a heavy burden to have. I agonized over that decision for a week.»

«I want him to make people afraid. I want to put fear into them. If he's hungry and plays with some attitude, ain't too many people who are going to deal with him. ...»

«I couldn't help myself,»

«Special teams have been good all the time. We just had a calamity in one game. Like anything else, we just need to be poised in crucial situations.»

«It's the same thing as if we ran a toss-sweep. Then you line up on first down and 'let's go.' That's the way I look at it. (Norwood) gets an extra down.»

«There's nobody around (in college football) like that now,»

«What's that Visa commercial? Priceless. Every single day, Coach Bryant and my dad, I think about them a couple of times a day because they are the two men that impacted my life more than anyone else and there isn't a day that goes by when I don't think about them.»

«I'll tell you what. I have met old guys who played for him at Kentucky and I never met them before and let me tell you something, it's a calling card. If someone played for Coach Bryant, you immediately respected the guy.»

«In some ways I think his legend is growing, I think it's getting bigger,»

«And it's going to be tough to do because he went almost 11 years without losing a conference game. That's not going to happen now. The times have changed and I think it was probably a period that will never be duplicated in this conference again.»