Pappy Nutt

In the middle of what seems to be an otherwise sane column about the diminishing returns of being a total asshole-it’s about Bill Parcells, natch-we found an intriguing nugget of information that almost made us drop our drink. (Almost-whew.)

There have been some rumors that Jones is putting out feelers to people like former Browns coach and Dallas assistant Butch Davis and Arkansas coach Houston Nutt, anticipating the possibility of Parcells walking away after one more season.

Houston Nutt? Please let this be true, since Nutt would be the ideal candidate for the job for one excellent reason:
HE IS COMPLETELY FUCKING INSANE.

Watching how Arkansas wins games would be enough reason to think Nutt would be the perfect compliment to the natural insanity surrounding the Cowboys. They’ll somehow lose to LSU by two, get killed by an out of conference team the next week, and then turn around and run for 6,000 yards in a game against a damn good team like Texas. They blow easy plays and hit sixty yard flea-flickers. They commit some of the stupidest penalties ever-I swear I saw a db come on to the field with no pants once-and still win the game on a fluky blocked punt, missed PAT, or the Matt Jones special, the long bomb resulting in a quadruple overtime game they somehow end up losing anyway.

(This was the Matt Jones offense, by the way. Stewart Mandel cannily noted this first in a column a while back: run for nothing for three quarters, then let Matt Jones run around and make shit up for a quarter to make it interesting.See? Totally fucking insane, but works pretty well for the Falcons in the NFL, too.)

But just in case the Matt Jones offense and the “Toonces the Driving Cat” style of play don’t make my case, watch Nutt on the sidelines sometime. Nutt is one of college football’s last real sweaters. I mean horrible, anxious, smells-like-fear monkey sweating with huge ovals of perspiration circling both arms. Every game for him is an exercise in riverboat gambling, knee-deep and out of cash in a huge Faro game with the deed to the plantation on the table. Shockingly, most of the time he gets dealt a winning hand.

Nutt also believes in the lost art of gesticulation (see pic above for some of his primo work in the field.) Nutt flails, screams, tosses objects, and displays all of the classic tics of someone under bowel-bursting pressure who almost can’t handle it. He’s like an enormous spastic fetus wearing red, picking his nose, wiping his face every three seconds, and just an instant away from killing and eating one of his grad assistants on the sidelines in front of a horrified Frank Broyles Stadium crowd.

Though this might be contrary to his personal interests-the NFL might actually kill him, or an unfortunate assistant coach in the wrong place at the wrong time-we here at ESBS.com would love to see Nutt get a shot, if only to watch him attack Jerry Jones with a clipboard after another one point, 14-13ish loss.

After all, the man’s last name is Nutt.