In our ongoing quest to become Official Curator of College Football Crap, we've been making efforts (read: at least two emails a week) trying to preserve and track down coaches' television ads and immortalize them via YouTube.
We've found some, though some other notables have eluded us thus far. Our top five most wanted list includes:
5. Joe Paterno's ads for Milano bread.
4. Tommy Tuberville's "Smells Like Victory" ads for Opelika-area Krogers.
3. Urban Meyer shilling for anything, since he's got the delivery of a guy with Guillain-Barre's syndrome.
2. Alvin Wyatt, the wielder of the mighty Bethune-Cookman Wyattbone, selling anything at all.
Alvin could sell thimbles to the thumbless looking as sexy as that.
1. The Bear Bryant Southern Bell Commercial. This is truly the white whale of coaching ads--so good as to be potentially apocryphal, in fact, though we're pretty sure it actually aired a few times. Bryant looks at the camera and, in a moment of complete and visibly emotional improv from the script, says "Call your Mama. I wish I could." The mention of this ad alone just made grown men from Mobile to Huntsville break down in gusting tears and drive their trucks off the road.
One quality lode we have found are Great Southern Wood's ads with the fat guy in the yellow hat (properly known as Jimmy Rane.) TFGITYH has been a fixture of college football broadcasts for over 15 years now, a plush, fleshy fanboy for multiple generations of Auburn coaches and other SEC dons. He also allegedly paid for the right to address his beloved Auburn Tigers pregame in the lockerroom once and broke down blubbering to a confused audience of players wondering "Isn't that TFGITYH? And how the hell did he get his ass in here?"
The highlights from Yellawood's Flash-only, non-Youtubing site:
--Jim Donnan judging a beauty contest, which is kind of like having Bob Huggins as your AA sponsor, looking as always as if he slept under that old rowboat in your backyard last night.
--Pat Dye building a fence across the goal line at Jerrrrdan-Hare. (Alabama fans just used Rory Turner for the same purpose--cheaper, and infinitely quotable.)
--One of the top ten most grizzled men in history, Gene Stallings, doing an admirable job as pitchman while looking at TFGITYH like he's three seconds from shooting him and leaving him the in woods.
Watch 'em all here.
Gene Stallings would totally love to shoot your fat ass and leave you in the woods.