Tovarech...welcome to Moscow!!! Dennis Erickson, very good college coach, professional disaster, and alleged fan of booze returns to the ranks of college coaching by coming full circle and becoming the biggest Vandal of all in accepting a post as the head coach at Idaho. It also gives USA Today the excuse to write the following headline on their college football home page:
ERICKSON IN IDAHO'S SACK
My, that relationship moved quickly. But what with all the gay cowboy fever spreading all over the nation, it's little wonder things moved that fast out there in the wide open spaces of the Potato state.
The return to Idaho in Erickson's eyes presents a logical progression:
"I just thought it was an opportunity for me to come back, give back and get back to coaching college football ... my first love," Erickson said at a news conference.
...or the only gig that really wanted to take a flyer on a coach whose job-hopping resume is a paean to Ritalin. Either way, Erickson fans can welcome him back with a bubbling round of applause as he's sure to give a brimming shot or eight of enthusiasm with a chaser of excitement to the Idaho program. Erickson's teams over the years have , in two and three year stints, scored tub-sized margaritas full of points, which Idaho's sure to do on the matador defenses of the WAC.
Over the years old Scotchy's done great work, a fact that shouldn't be clouded by the beer goggles of the current visage of a man who spent two years running San Francisco into the ground in the pros. He piloted some of the most thugged out teams in the history of the Miami program, which is kind of like saying you've been to prison...in hell. (This is the title of a real movie, but we'll be damned if we can find the IMDB entry. The poster depicts a flaming skeleton reaching through the bars of a blockhouse situated in what appears to the backdrop from an old Dio video. If we ever found the poster, we'd sell it to Glenn Danzig for a million dollars and start typing this from an undisclosed location off the coast of Thailand.) Erickson also gave the world the monstrous Oregon State team baddddd enough to dupe Sports Illustrated into placing the Beavers on the cover of SI the following year, a team whose annihilation of a positively retarded ND squad solidified the notion that Bob Davie could not coach a squad of trained Russian wolfhounds to victory over a hutch of cuddly baby rabbits.
Erickson's spread sets from the '80s are credited by many--including Urban Meyer--for inspiring the spread movement in college offensive coaching.
Erickson: back to Moscow.
So we're kind of looking at a piece of history here--a shock-haired, khakis-wearing, hard-drinking damn-the-NCAA-I'm-recruiting-straight-from-the-reform-school type we're not likely to see again for a while. A relic worth watching? Oh, yes. We say welcome back Coach Erickson, and the first round's on us. After that, though, you're on your own, since we don't carry that kind of cash on us, and binge drinking in Idaho could lead to freezing to death in a ditch if you're not careful.
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