100 Days, 100 Reasons G6 Football Matters — No. 91: Brett Favre Beat Alabama After a Car Crash

Southern Miss was his only Division I scholarship offer. He arrived in Hattiesburg as the seventh-string quarterback. The equipment manager told him the only quarterback number left was No. 4.

Everything about Brett Favre was supposed to be temporary. The number. The school. The career. He outlasted all of it.

He started 10 games as a freshman. By his sophomore year under new coach Curley Hallman, Southern Miss went 10-2 and won the Independence Bowl. By 1989, Favre played the way he would play for the next two decades — reckless, fearless, convinced he could make every throw. On September 2 in Jacksonville, he beat No. 6 Florida State 30-26 with a game-winning touchdown pass to Anthony Harris with 23 seconds left. Florida State had finished No. 3 in the country the year before. Favre drove 58 yards in the final six and a half minutes like the game owed him something.

On July 14, 1990, Favre and three friends spent the day fishing at Dauphin Island, Alabama. On the drive home, a few tenths of a mile from his parents’ house in Kiln, Mississippi, he lost control of the car. It flipped three times and came to rest against a tree. One of his brothers smashed a window with a golf club to pull him out.

Doctors removed 30 inches of his small intestine. He spent eight days in the hospital. Surgery was on August 8.

“All I kept asking was, ‘Will I be able to play football again?’” Favre said.

The answer was supposed to be no. Southern Miss opened the season September 1 against Delta State without him. They won 12-0. The following week, the Golden Eagles traveled to Legion Field to face Alabama and 75,962 fans. Gene Stallings was coaching his first game as Alabama’s head coach — the man who would win the national championship two years later.

Favre started. Thirty-one days after surgery. Because that is who Brett Favre was.

He threw for 125 yards on 9-of-17 passing. He didn’t need to be spectacular. He moved the team, and the defense did the rest — Kerry Valrie intercepted two passes, returning one 75 yards for a touchdown. With 7:22 left and the score tied 24-24, Favre drove Southern Miss from their own 20. He hit receiver Michael Jackson for 34 yards to the Alabama 32. Jim Taylor kicked a 52-yard field goal — a line drive through the uprights with 3:35 remaining.

Southern Miss 27, Alabama 24. Stallings’ debut, ruined.

“I didn’t make any big plays. I didn’t do anything great,” Favre said. “But I moved the team up and down the field. I wanted this team to win.”

That quote tells you everything. Favre never cared about the stat line. He cared about winning, and he played like a man who refused to accept any other outcome. Two months later, he beat ranked Auburn 13-12 with a game-winning touchdown with 46 seconds left — using the same play that beat Florida State a year earlier. Southern Miss became the first non-conference school to beat both Alabama and Auburn in the same year since World War I.

The Falcons drafted him in the second round. He threw four passes in Atlanta. Completed none. Two were intercepted. Ron Wolf saw something nobody else did and traded a first-round pick to bring him to Green Bay. What followed was 297 consecutive starts — a man who never missed a game, who played through broken bones and torn ligaments and everything else because sitting out was not in his programming. Three consecutive MVP awards. A Super Bowl. Pro Football Hall of Fame, class of 2016.

Southern Miss retired No. 4 on September 18, 1993. It was the only quarterback number they had left when he walked in the door.

They told you it didn’t matter. Here are 100 reasons it does.