Long before Jerome Bettis stood on a stage in Canton wearing a gold jacket, the Steelers icon had a much simpler goal. Football wasn’t a lifelong dream. For Bettis, the sport was just a means to have something ready for him in the immediate future.

“I just played football so I could get a scholarship,” Bettis said on the Not Just Football podcast with Cameron Heyward. “Matter of fact, here’s the thing, I didn’t even want to play in the NFL. That was never a dream of mine.”

“I started my freshman year of high school, right? I’m a linebacker. My sophomore year, I played tight end and nose guard. I didn’t play running back until my junior year of high school. Then I go to Notre Dame and I play fullback, a true fullback. I played there for three years. I get drafted to play a different position. They want me to play tailback. I’ve never played tailback in my life.”

Bettis might not have envisioned an NFL career for himself, but his exploits at Notre Dame got him drafted by the Los Angeles Rams as the 10th overall pick in the 1993 NFL Draft. Along with a degree, he was getting a lucrative shot at a dream that not many are able to realize in their lifetimes.

Fondly nicknamed ‘The Bus,’ Bettis put himself on the map from the get-go. He rushed for a whopping 1,439 yards as a rookie, and also added seven scores. He made the Pro Bowl and was also named the Offensive Rookie of the Year. The NFL was seeing a generational player in the making.

“I go to the Pro Bowl… You know who the running backs in the Pro Bowl were? It was me, Barry Sanders, and Emmitt Smith. Like, are you kidding me? I’m barely 21 years old,” Bettis said in astonishment.

A significant moment in Bettis’s career occurred in his rookie season. In Week 2, the Rams hosted Bill Cowher’s Pittsburgh Steelers. Bettis rushed for 76 yards and a touchdown and helped the Rams trounce the Steelers 27-0. The iconic RB might not have known how important that performance was to the rest of his career.

In 1996, Cowher and the Steelers traded for Bettis, changing the course of their franchise forever.

Bettis immediately established himself as Pittsburgh’s bell cow. He rushed for 1,431 yards and 11 touchdowns in his first year in the Steel City, after being severely limited in his game by the St. Louis Rams in 1995 because of its pass-heavy offense. In the same year, Jerome Bettis rightly won the NFL Comeback Player of the Year title.

Bettis’s hard-nosed running style matched perfectly with the Steelers and Pittsburgh’s tough blue-collar identity. He was the defining face of that era of Steelers football. In his ten seasons with the Steelers, ‘The Bus’ was able to cross the 1,000-yard mark six times. Today, it’ll be tough to think of a Mount Rushmore for the Pittsburgh Steelers and not consider Bettis in it.

The iconic RB’s career had a fairytale ending. The last game he played was Super Bowl XL in his hometown of Detroit, which the Steelers won. Not a bad way to end a career Bettis never even planned to pursue.

Bettis finished his career with 13,662 career rushing yards. It was the fifth-highest total all-time then, and is the eighth-highest now. He made six Pro Bowls in total and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2015.

What began as a quest for a simple college scholarship resulted in one of the most iconic Pittsburgh Steelers careers of all time. While he might not have dreamt of the NFL, football made sure to find a way into his life regardless. And we are all the better for it.