Human beings have been harnessing honey for somewhere between 8,000 and 40,000 years, but until Brady Quinn, the viscous fluid had never been seen as an athletic performance enhancer.

As the former NFL and Notre Dame quarterback told his co-hosts on Fox’s Big Noon Kickoff on Saturday, he would frequently drink honey straight from a plastic bear-shaped bottle before college games.

‘I grew up, wrestling and football early in the mornings, so my parents would give me this honey bottle, like a tablespoon of sugar [to get] a sugar high,’ the 42-year-old said from Iowa City before the Hawkeyes hosted the Wisconsin Badgers.

Former Heisman winner and Quinn’s co-host Mark Ingram quickly produced a bottle of the syrupy natural sweetener.

‘Something like this?’ Ingram asked.

Quinn, perhaps expecting the bottle, quickly went into a demonstration.

Brady Quinn shows off his pregame ritual of drinking honey straight from a bear-shaped bottle

The former Notre Dame QB framed his use of honey as something of a performance enhancer 

‘I was gonna ask if they had some,’ Quinn said as he opened the bottle.

From there, Quinn tilted his head back and poured some bee nectar down his throat.

‘That’s my pregame ritual,’ Quinn said with a full mouth of honey. ‘It’s not bad.’

Former Heisman winner and USC quarterback Matt Leinart disagreed.

‘That’s disgusting,’ the 43-year-old said.

Quinn’s pregame ritual did get a few gasps from the crowd, but it didn’t turn off viewers the way former Kentucky quarterback Will Levis once did with his own personal quirk.

Revealed before he was drafted in the second round of the 2023 NFL Draft by the Tennessee Titans, Levis’ practice of using mayonnaise in coffee was widely rejected by fans. Still, Levis embraced the pseudo controversy before the draft by doing a playful ad for Hellmann’s Mayonnaise.