Back When: Rodregis Brooks left on a stretcher. He came back wearing his mom’s jersey.

Rodregis Brooks was carried off the field on a stretcher in the second quarter. Neck brace. Immobile arm. Twenty of his family members gathered under the north stands at Legion Field while doctors cut his pads and jersey apart to X-ray his neck.

If you were in the stadium that day, you did not know he was OK. There was no update on your phone. No crawl on a screen. The last thing you saw was UAB's best player flat on a board, and then he was gone.

What happened next belongs in any conversation about the greatest individual performances in UAB football history. But that conversation comes later. First, the game had to be won — and the Blazers were losing it without him.

It was November 6, 1999. UAB was in only its fourth year of Division I-A football. East Carolina came into Legion Field ranked 18th in the country and 7-1, a team that had beaten Miami by scoring 24 unanswered points earlier that season. A year earlier, Alabama had beaten East Carolina at the same field by a single point.

UAB was 3-5 and starting its third-string quarterback.

Lee Jolly had torn an ACL on special teams against Cincinnati three weeks earlier. Dixon, the starter, went down during Wednesday's practice — stepped on a teammate's shoe and severely injured his ankle. That left Thomas Cox, a redshirt freshman who had entered the season third on the depth chart.

"It gave him plenty of time to get nervous," Watson Brown told Adam Rubin of the Birmingham News. "And the young man, I thought, had great poise, did what we asked him to do."

Cox would finish 10-for-20 with 122 yards, a touchdown pass and no interceptions. He ran for two more scores. But at halftime, none of that had happened yet. East Carolina led 17-6. UAB had not crossed midfield on offense. Brooks was somewhere under the north stands, and the Blazers were playing without the best player on the roster.

East Carolina handed UAB the momentum in the third quarter.

East Carolina had fourth-and-10 from its own 39. UAB had only 10 men on the field, and nobody was covering receiver Erik Hines near the sideline. Punter Andrew Bayes saw the opening, took the snap and threw for Hines. The pass fell incomplete. For the first time all afternoon, the Blazers had the ball in East Carolina territory.

"That was the floodgates right there," East Carolina coach Steve Logan told the News.

Two plays later, Cox hit Ernest Ross for a 39-yard touchdown. Then the defense took over. Eric Lampley — who had passed out before the previous home game against Memphis and been hospitalized, playing his first extended action since — jarred the ball loose from East Carolina's Richard Alston and recovered it. Cox scored on a 5-yard run on the next play. UAB had the lead.

The defensive line that afternoon was the engine beneath everything. East Carolina had averaged 172 rushing yards per game. UAB held them to 9. Cary Estes of the Post-Herald reported that 14 of the Pirates' 72 offensive plays went for negative yardage. The Blazers recorded six sacks — a school record — from a unit that had managed 11 through its first eight games. Defensive line coach Pat Donohoe had delivered an ultimatum before the game.

"He was telling us all morning, 'If you're not getting the job done, you're coming out and you might not go back in,'" sophomore nose guard Marlon Bush told the Post-Herald. "He was serious. So we had to play well. We didn't want to be embarrassed."

"We just physically and mentally outplayed them," sophomore nose guard James Malone told the Post-Herald. "That's all it was. We outplayed them."

Cox ran for a 3-yard score with 47 seconds left in the third quarter. UAB had scored 23 points in the period. The Blazers led 26-17, and East Carolina's collapse was total — two fumbles lost and a failed fourth-down conversion, all in the same quarter.

But the game was not over. And Rodregis Brooks was back.

Nobody in the stands expected to see him again. He had been carried off on a stretcher. A tackle in the second quarter left his left arm numb. Pain followed. And then the arm would not move.

"When you're on the field and you get injured to where you can't move something, it's very scary," Brooks told the News. "When I couldn't move my left arm, all kinds of things shot through my mind, thinking about not moving again. What if you can never play again? You think about life as a whole."

His mother, Cathey, had been beside him from the moment they carried him off.

"My mom was praying the whole time," Brooks told the News. "As soon as I got injured, when they carried me off, she was standing there right beside me, saying, 'You're OK, you're OK, you're OK.' My mom's a very strong person. She said I will be back there playing. Fifteen or 20 minutes later, I was back on the field. My mom was right."

The X-rays came back clean. No structural damage. Brooks was cleared. But his jersey and pads were in pieces — the medical staff had cut them apart to X-ray his neck without moving it.

His mom was wearing his 1998 jersey. She had worn it to the game that day. She pulled it off and gave it to her son.

"Usually it gets cold around this time and she doesn't wear it," Brooks told the News. "I'm glad it was warm today."

Brooks put on the old No. 21 and a protective collar to guard his neck. He went out for a series. He came back to the sideline and told them to take it off.

"I went out there with that on and said, 'I can't keep wearing this,'" Brooks told the News. "I couldn't move my neck at all. I said, 'I'm fine. Just take everything off.'"

No collar. His mother's jersey. Division I-A's interception leader, back from a stretcher, with nothing protecting his neck but stubbornness and faith.

In the third quarter, he fielded a punt and returned it 59 yards to the East Carolina 3-yard line, setting up another UAB score. If you had not noticed he was back, you noticed now.

In the fourth quarter, he intercepted a pass and returned it 91 yards for a touchdown, diving into the end zone to cap 33 unanswered Blazers points and put the game away. The interception was his eighth of the season — a school record.

"Every time he touches the ball, something big happens," Cox told the News. "At the beginning it shocked me. It doesn't shock me anymore."

"He can play for anybody in the country," Brown told the News.

The final score was 36-17. UAB's first victory over a ranked opponent. A program that had ridden a bus to Auburn three years earlier — "I just can't forget getting on that bus going to Auburn with people laughing at us," Brown told Kevin Scarbinsky of the News. "All-out laughing at us." — had just beaten a team that sat above Texas A&M, Michigan State, Ohio State and Notre Dame in the AP poll.

"People in other parts of the country will know that UAB plays football now for the first time," Brown told the News.

Paul Finebaum, writing in the Post-Herald, described a speaking engagement in Mobile two days later where the first question from the audience was about UAB football — not Shaun Alexander's Heisman Trophy chances, not hometown hero Tee Martin. UAB. "In such a short time," Finebaum wrote, "this program has gone from a laughingstock to becoming a model for others to use."

Brooks finished the 1999 season as a second-team AP All-American. He was drafted by the Indianapolis Colts. Three years earlier, as a freshman, he had intercepted a pass in UAB's first Division I-A win — a 42-17 rout of Arkansas State at the same Legion Field where he made history on this afternoon.

After the game, Cathey Brooks joined her son in the interview area. She was wearing a white UAB T-shirt. The jersey she had brought to the game — the one she pulled off her own back so her son could play — was still on him.

"I was like, 'Oh, God, help my baby,'" she told the News about the moments after the injury. "Then God told me, He spoke to my heart and said, 'Don't be moved by what you see. Have faith in Me.' And that's what I did. He's an awesome God."

"I knew he was going to come back stronger and better," she said. "You have seen nothing yet."