Yeah, I knew he had been sick. There will never be another one of him.

Stabler will probably go down as the last guy to get kicked off both his high school and college football teams and go on to win a Super Bowl. He actually wanted to be a pitcher in the major leagues, but in the '60s you had a much better chance of getting a football scholarship to Alabama than a baseball scholarship.
Like Namath, for whom he understudied in college, he was a very good running quarterback until he tore up a knee. Absent the Immaculate Deception shenanigan, that playoff game in Pittsburgh would have been remembered, though certainly not as vividly, for a long touchdown run by Stabler in the last two minutes.

Forgive my indulgence into Raiderland now, but the game that still galls me is the '75 AFC championship, when the Steelers accidentally on purpose froze the field between the hashmarks and the sidelines to neutralize the Raiders' outside speed, specifically Cliff Branch. The Raiders still almost won the game. Branch caught a pass and was tackled at about the 15-yard line, but while Mel Blount sat on him, the ball was taken out of his hands by a ball boy and the officials couldn't find another one to put at the line of scrimmage until after the clock ran out.
It's odd how the Raiders were the ones who always got cited for bending the rules back then, but the Stealers benefitted from cheating more than any other team in the history of the NFL, until the Belichick Patriots. The Stealers doled out steroids like aspirin tablets. What they did to Mike Webster in the name of winning football games is criminal.