Ken “Snake” Stabler

Ask anybody who sat in the Coliseum in the 1970s who the coolest man in the building was and you'll get the same answer every time. Not Madden, not Al Davis. Kenny Stabler, number 12, the left hander with the slow walk to the huddle, the guy who'd be down 4 with a minute left and look like he was waiting for a bus.

He was born on Christmas Day 1945 in Foley, Alabama, and he was the best athlete in town at basically everything. He averaged 29 points a game in basketball, and as a left handed pitcher he got minor league offers from the Houston Astros and the New York Yankees. He also got his nickname at Foley High, when his coach watched him run a long, winding touchdown and started calling him Snake. Foley went 29 and 1 with him at quarterback.

Bear Bryant brought him to Tuscaloosa. He sat behind Steve Sloan in 1965 while Alabama won a second straight national title, then took over in 1966 and went 11 and 0, finishing with a 34 to 7 win over Nebraska in the Sugar Bowl. Alabama still finished third in the polls. His senior year was rockier. Bryant actually kicked him off the team for cutting class and partying before giving him another chance, and Stabler paid him back in the rain at Legion Field, running 47 yards through the mud to beat Auburn 7 to 3. In Alabama they still call it the Run in the Mud.

Oakland took him in the second round of the 1968 draft, 52nd overall, and the start was a mess. He had knee surgery, spent 1968 on the reserve list, got sent to the Spokane Shockers of the Continental Football League for two games, and in July 1969 he walked away from the Raiders altogether. By January 1970 he and John Madden had patched it up, and he finally threw his first regular season passes for Oakland that fall.

For three years he mostly watched Daryle Lamonica. The first time the league really noticed him was a playoff game in Pittsburgh in December 1972, when he came off the bench and ran 30 yards for a touchdown that put Oakland ahead with 1:17 left. That lead lasted until Franco Harris and the Immaculate Reception. In 1973, after Lamonica couldn't get the offense going in the first three games, Stabler took the job, and he didn't give it back for seven years.

The knee injuries had turned him from a scrambler into a pure pocket passer, and he became a master at it. He had Cliff Branch running past people, Fred Biletnikoff catching everything on the sideline and Dave Casper over the middle, all three of them Hall of Famers, and he called his own plays. In 1974 he threw a league best 26 touchdown passes and was named the NFL's Most Valuable Player and Offensive Player of the Year.

1976 was the masterpiece. He completed 66.7 percent of his passes, threw 27 touchdowns, led the league with a 103.4 passer rating, and Oakland went 13 and 1. Then on January 9, 1977, at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, he went 12 for 19 for 180 yards and a touchdown as the Raiders beat Minnesota 32 to 14 in Super Bowl XI. It was the first championship in franchise history. He won the Hickok Belt as the top pro athlete of the year.

From 1973 through 1977 he took the Raiders to five straight AFC Championship Games, a record for a quarterback that held for almost 40 years until Tom Brady passed it. Along the way he authored a pile of plays so famous they have names: the Sea of Hands against Miami, the Ghost to the Post at Baltimore, and the Holy Roller at San Diego, which was so ridiculous the league changed the fumble rules because of it.

The off the field stuff was just as famous. He wrote in his autobiography, Snake, that the monotony of training camp would have driven some of them crazy without whiskey and women, and he once said the Raiders were the only pro team that traveled with its own bail bondsman. Madden remembered him walking off after a bad throw muttering low ball thrower, highball drinker. That was the Raiders, and he was the Raiders.

It ended the way Raider stories usually ended in those years. After two non playoff seasons and the departure of Madden and a lot of the old guard, Davis traded him to Houston in March 1980 for Dan Pastorini. He left as the franchise's career leader in completions (1,486), passing yards (19,078) and touchdown passes (150), with a 69 and 26 record as Oakland's starter. He played two years for the Oilers and parts of three for the Saints before retiring in October 1984.

He went on to broadcast games for CBS and then for Alabama on the radio. He died of colon cancer on July 8, 2015, at 69, and researchers at Boston University later found Stage 3 CTE in his brain. The Hall of Fame call he waited decades for came the next winter, and he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame posthumously on August 6, 2016.

Stabler's whole legend is the last two minutes. He finished his career with 23 comebacks in the fourth quarter or overtime, and he was the fastest quarterback ever to 100 wins as a starter at the time, getting there in 150 games and beating Johnny Unitas' mark of 153.

The playoffs were where he lived. He threw a touchdown pass in 10 straight postseason games, an NFL record when he retired, and in Oakland he went 7 and 4 as a playoff starter with 19 touchdown passes. He was also the first quarterback to retire averaging at least 200 passing yards a game in the playoffs with 10 or more appearances.

John Madden, who coached him through 1978, put it simply: if he had one drive to win a game, he'd pick Kenny. And then he'd add that the hotter the game got, the cooler Stabler got. Everybody who watched those Raiders knows exactly what he meant.