When Alabama football players can’t have The Waysider’s world famous homemade biscuits, you can bet the Crimson Tide-loving restaurant will ship them a batch cross-country to make sure they’re fed before The Rose Bowl.

Jeff Allen (Alabama’s Associate Athletics Director, Sports Medicine) on Sunday posted on X photos of Jalen Milroe, Terrion Arnold and Caleb Downs posing with a pan of biscuits from the historic Tuscaloosa restaurant sent by owner Linda Smelley.

“Every Friday morning this crew has had breakfast at the Waysider in Tuscaloosa,” Allen wrote in the post. “Mrs. Linda at the Waysider shipped some of her famous biscuits to us in California! The 1925 Bama team brought their own water to the Rose Bowl, the 2023 team brought their own biscuits! Roll Tide!”

Smelley previously confirmed to AL.com that Milroe, Arnold and Downs visited the restaurant each Friday morning during the 2023 season, a tradition featured on ESPN’s “College GameDay.”

On an average day, they might serve around 200-300 biscuits. On a busy day, like when Alabama plays football or just a normal Saturday, Smelley loses count. “We make several pans. I never count them, I just do them,” she said. “Each pan makes 48 biscuits. That’s about eight pans a day. On weekends, oh my gosh, it’s double that. People eat so many biscuits.”

When Alabama played LSU in November, Smelley said she thought she’d never stop making them. “One day I used 40 pounds of flour. That’s a lot of biscuits,” she said. When word got out that Milroe, Arnold and Downs ate there, fans began lining up. “Everybody was outside waiting to get in here, so I’ve been making biscuits,” Smelley said.

Famous for its “Breakfast of Champions,” The Waysider serves made-from-scratch biscuits with every order. Fluffy, golden brown buttermilk goodness that absolutely melt in your mouth, with or without the extra dollop of butter you might add. To be clear, the biscuits come with every egg dish or order including a meat entree, but not with pancakes or French toast. Fear not, you can always get a side order of the biscuits if you want them.

The Historic Waysider Restaurant opened as an eatery in the mid-19th century 1951. Located on Greensboro Avenue just off of 15th Street, the little red house with some of the Southeast’s best biscuits remains one of the town’s cornerstone restaurant destinations thanks to its rich history, Southern hospitality, delicious breakfast and lunch and Alabama football-inspired décor. It belongs on every college football fan’s bucket list.

Smelley said it’s no big secret, that world-famous Waysider biscuits follow a recipe similar to what you’ll see on the back of a bag of White Lily Flour. But if you don’t have the feel, you don’t get the biscuits. “It’s basically the same thing, but you’ve just got to know how much,” she said. “We don’t have a recipe. We just pour it in there, pick up a handful of Crisco and buttermilk and just go by the texture. We don’t measure. So I couldn’t tell you how much … I couldn’t do it.”

Twelve years after the restaurant opened in 1948, Farr bought it in 1960 when Tuscaloosa only had a handful of breakfast options, so the restaurant and the biscuits became a big hit almost instantaneously. “We were downtown, right here near the center of things. Of course, we’re not considered downtown now, but back then we were,” Smelley said. “The little trolley ran through the street downtown. A lot of people ate here. A lot of business people. Not just blue-collar, but white-collar and everything.”

It’s simple. “We make ‘em from scratch,” Smelley said. “We don’t empty a bag, mix or pre-mix or anything like that. You know that they’re homemade. You can taste the buttermilk in them. They’re fluffy. They’re biscuits.” She remembers, when she first began working at The Waysider in 1976, an article in The Dallas Morning News, titled “In search of a better biscuit” about the restaurant. “You just don’t find them like ours,” she said. “Most of them are pre-mixed or pre-measured or instant. And a lot of them taste like rolls, to me.”

The most famous around these parts, of course, is Paul “Bear” Bryant. The legendary Crimson Tide head coach even had his own spot in the already-tight space. AL.com’s Bob Carlton wrote about the Bryant table, “He usually sat alone at a little wooden table in the corner near the front door. … He typically ordered sugar-cured ham with grits, biscuits and coffee, and he read the newspaper while he ate. That old table is now like a shrine to Coach Bryant. A houndstooth hat is perched on a bust of the coach that sits on the table, alongside a vase of crimson and white flowers. Framed photographs and memories from his 25-year coaching career at Alabama cover the wall behind it.”

Others include a barrage of sports personalities including coaches (the late Bobby Knight), athletes (former heavyweight boxing champion Deontay Wilder, and “a lot of football players,” Smelley said), politicians (U.S. senators like Richard Shelby and Katie Britt), and ESPN on-air personalities like Todd Blackledge who shot his “Todd’s Taste of the Town” segment there and the network’s Marty Smith (” Everything about that place was unbelievable,” Smith said) and Ryan McGee (“Their country ham was off the charts.”), who even sang the praises of the restaurant on the air.

Smelley said they’ve even had movie stars pop in and out. She recalls actors from the 1970s like Brian Keith while famously filming the Burt Reynolds action film “Hooper” in town, as well as John Marley who played the Hollywood producer who wakes up to a horse head in his bed in “The Godfather.”