You always hear about how Bear Bryant and Pat Dye were friends, but, like, good friends, friends who went hunting together and had pictures of themselves hunting and stuff. And that they maybe even had a protege / mentor thing going on. And to me at least, there was always kind of the implication that it wasn’t just because Dye was an assistant for Bryant at Alabama. It was, like, that they couldn’t help but be friends… that they shared some deep, generation-spanning understanding and appreciation of each other as southern football men or something.
Of course, most of that feeling comes from things Dye said over the yearss, about how Bear supposedly tried to talking him out of taking the Auburn job.