Did you ever see Derrick Thomas destroy quarterbacks in his prime? Or watch Shaun Alexander juke his way to the end zone wearing the crimson and white? How about Bobby Humphrey bowling over opponents like tenpins? Have you ever beheld the greatness of The Deuce?

Probably not.

You hear these names invoked by we old cogers and just assume they match the badasses Nick Saban rolls out year after year. Fact is; they were that good. And now you don't have to simply trust us on this. You can see for yourselves.

Back in the dark years of the interwebs, the best you might find was a clip of a single play or two from an important Alabama game. Usually it was burdened with cringeworthy background music and a ginormous logo of some shoddy fansite praying for pageviews. No longer. Recently a decent number of complete Alabama games from years past have been uploaded in their entirety onto YouTube and other services.

The upside? There's a ton of superb Bama players to witness in the glory of their greatness. The downside? There's a ton of losses since fans of other teams seem to make a point of posting their wins over the Crimson Tide. Weird, I know.

So here is an index of these games I've pulled together. I've made the cutoff point for this list 2007 because it's not too difficult to find specific games past that. And the first year of the Saban era is a good starting point for newish Crimson Tide fans to start learning about the contests of yore.

I've also drawn the line at entire games. There's a lot of shortened excerpts and such for very good past Alabama games out there but keeping track of all of them is just not realistic. There are two exceptions: 1) games that are two-parters (check YouTube's right side menu for the next one) and 2) longer features of older games. The former are marked with two asterisks and the latter with two.

One warning: there's a lot of Tim Brando in the announcers booth. One blessing: there's a hell of a lot more Keith Jackson. Listen to the latter, whippersnappers. It's the sound of excellence and everything we hold as wonderful about this sport. If you are fascinated by male hair dye, seeing the former in years past will be illuminating.

This is very much a work in progress so if you espy other games out there let me know in the comments or by email and I'll add them to the list. I'll see about reposting this in the off-season to help us get through the lean months.

As always, Roll Tide, my friends.