SEC BeachFest is a time when the stories get passed around easily. That's what tends to happen when a bunch of old coaches get together, especially in front of an audience that is there to listen.

On Saturday, Pat Dye shared the story of a conversation he had with Paul "Bear" Bryant when he was thinking of taking the Auburn job in 1981.

"He got wind that I was interested in the Auburn job and they were interested in me and he called me and said, 'What are you doing?'" said Dye, who'd served on Bryant's staff at Alabama from 1965-73. "I said, 'What do you mean, what am I doing?' He said, 'You ain't going to Auburn.' I said, 'I'm going to Auburn if they offer me the job. He said, 'No, you're going to get this job.'

"I said, 'Coach, I ain't going to get that job. You've got too many former players and too many former coaches that have Alabama ties. I won't ever get that job and besides that, I don't want that job. If I came to Alabama, I'd just be running a maintenance program, trying to maintain what you've already done. Ain't nobody alive can do that.' Saban wasn't born then.

"He said, 'Well, you ain't going to beat me.' I said, 'Well, you ain't going to be there forever.' I didn't want to challenge him on that front. But we did beat him."

Pat Dye says Bear Bryant, pictured here in 1979, tried to talk him out of taking the Auburn job in 1981. (Bernard Troncale/al.com)

While Dye challenged the idea that he learned everything he knew from Bryant -- "I didn't learn how to win at Alabama. I'd won everywhere I'd been before I got to Alabama," he said -- he learned plenty more about how to win consistently from the Alabama legend.

"I learned about organization and preparation, fundamentals and how hard you've actually got to work and having a plan for everything," Dye said. "Coach Bryant had nothing not covered. He wasn't going to put a football team on the field that wasn't prepared in every phase of the game for anything that could possibly happen.

"I coached for him for nine years, coaching linebackers, and at no time in nine years did he ever tell me or suggest to me how to coach linebackers. Not one time. He expected me to know how to coach them, to learn how to coach them or get them coached. If he didn't think we were playing very good at that position, he had his way of getting the message across, but it wasn't telling me how to coach on the field. It was a great experience."