Paul beat us to a long-bandied question: which coach would you want to have a beer with? And more importantly, who wouldn't you want to have a beer with? Paul gives some fine answers, but we have to add our contributions, if only because we think we're very knowledgeable on the topic.
Top Three Coaches To Drink With:
1. Ed Orgeron. Allegedly doesn't drink anymore following a conversion to Christianity and a domestic violence incident many moons ago, but we'd be more than happy to feed the beast inside The Orgeron three quarts of bourbon and watch the small town of Oxford get the Rambo treatment from a shirtless, raging Orge. We'd play the part of Richard Crenna, ducking behind a flaming piece of wreckage and screaming at the hapless Sheriff, "YOU BROUGHT THIS ON YOURSELVES!" as National Guard helicopter pilots watched The Orgeron catch rockets in midair, rip the tip off with his bare hands, and spit the explosives into their rotors with devastating effect.
Shots on the house!
2. Mike Shula. With Ed, we think the drinking would probably begin at a dive bar with shots and end under an overpass in Southern Mississippi with guzzling something purple out of bottle in a brown paper bag prior to our final showdown with law enforcement. With Mike Shula...well, we're thinking 2 for 1 dacquiris at Chi-Chis,
maxing out at the four dacquiri mark before we ask him about all the secrets of the Alabama program-- like seeing if it's true that the severed head of Bear Bryant is really kept in a jar of Formalin passed from coach to coach, and if the real reason Mike Price was fired was taking said head to a strip club and attempting to tip a stripper with it. We imagine him as...giggly.
3. Mark Mangino. We just want to see how much beer we can fit into the fat bastard, that's all. Seriously: we bet the guy could eclipse twenty in a four hour span with little difficulty--that's a realistic guess. Downside: we might die attempting to even keep half pace with the perfectly spherical Kansas coach, or at least earn a righteous stomach-pumping.
Guys we wouldn't drink with:
1. Dennis Erickson. Like a boozy, erratically orbiting Kohoutek, he's gonna be back in college football before long, and when he eventually falls into the orbit of some needy program the liquor stores of that town better brace themselves. Erickson is one of college football's last surviving shotglass-cleaning apemen, and we'd bow out of any night of drinking with him for fear of waking up in Singapore with a splitting headache, staples in our back where a kidney should be, and a mysterious soreness in our ass. Orgeron and Erickson in the same bar could start a coup--which is exactly what happened at the 1986 Port-Au-Prince Coaches convention, where a drunken meetup between the two overthrew the corrupt regime of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, simultaneously liberating Haiti and plunging the island into chaos. Danger, danger.
Baby Doc Duvalier, deposed by a confluence of two uncontrollabel natural forces.
2. Sylvester Croom. Would avoid just on the basis of the Big Man Rule: when a big man starts to cry, you simply have no choice but to cry along with him. If Croom is feeling sentimental, we'd be goners, and we'd like to keep the little dignity we have left by avoiding the embarrassment of weeping drunk in public...again.
3. Bill Snyder. Remember the movie The Opposite of Sex? Back when Christina Ricci had tits? Bill Snyder is the star of a movie called The Opposite of Fun, and the script is his miserable, molelike life as coach of the Kansas State Wildcats. Would order a ginger ale and scowl as you tried to goad him into telling jokes starting with "Michael Bishop is so dumb..." (how dumb is he...) A nightmare scenario drinking wise, unless you can double the discomfort and drive him away by paying strippers to dance in his direction.