The offseason survival guide would like to help you through this long, football-free offseason. In order to speed up this process, we’re all going back to 1979 to learn to be smooth. Crack open the champale and get your SMU jersey out. It’s about to get smoother than you ever imagined, albeit in a non-football way.

A Smooth House. The whole idea of smooth is to pretend you’re living on a houseboat in California, or in a ski house in Vail. (Not Aspen-that’s so 80s, man.) If you don’t have a houseboat in California, that’s fine: purchase a houseboat somewhere else. The houseboat should come equipped with a hot, lanky woman who wakes up in a bikini on it four or five days a week. She should be a marine biologist, or failing that,

If you can’t find a houseboat equipped with a hot, lanky woman in a hip-hugger two-piece, or just can’t find a houseboat, you must consider purchasing a home in the woods. The home should be made of pine cut into boards set at 45 degree angles, and it should feature wraparound decks, huge bay windows in geometric shapes, and an irregular offset roof with a window across the top. It should be decorated in mostly browns, feature lots of rugs and wicker furniture, and have a hot tub you can go into naked with some pink champagne and a brunette majoring in ecology or some shit like that.

Oh, and a fireplace with a rug in front of it, because that’s where you get your smooth lovin’ on. It’s as key as blow, backgammon, and Dallas on Friday nights.

Fondue. No class smoothness can happen without fondue. It’s important if you’re classing up to the Smooth Life to have a primo fondue set. It’s beyond question that the highest calling of a the sophisticated smooth gentleman of 1980 is satsify woman in the smoothest but still indomitable way. And what shows your controlled but steady heat of your Sterno-hot soul like fondue, which combines something classy and foreign with something completely American: covering tasty shit in low grade melted cheese.

Hot, but smooooooooth.

Plus there’s all these forks and shit that go with it. It’s sort of like purchasing a knife set-manly!-that you can use to impress ladies with while eating cheese. If you called that a hat trick, brother, then smooth is in the very marrow of your bones.

Raquetball. Gyms are for gay guys, and though you’re technically cool with that, you wear the bait-and-tackle-revealing jean cutoffs for the ladies and for the ladies only. And who wants to get all muscle-y and ripped? Again, you’re about being a lean, smooth-sailin’ vessel, and all the Hawaiian shirts, ski vests, Swedish ski sweaters and Izod shirts you just purchased didn’t come cheap, hombre. (Thus explaining the Velveeta used instead of the more expensive Emmenthaler, baby.)

So get some male-bonding time, exercise, and another excuse to buy some more shit with all that sweet money you’re making with your Texas Instruments and Teledyne stock in one easy step: racquetball. You have to wear special goggles, use a racket, buy special shoes, wear short shorts to show off the legs, buy some new striped tube socks, and use a special ball that smells just like the aroma of a used condom heated by hot fireside action after some fondue and Champale. (Not that you use a condom, smooth guy. It’s all organic with me. The rest is her problem, man.)

The added bonus are the nasty scars and bruises you might get when your partner broadsides you with the edge of his racquet. See? I wasn’t meaning to be macho, because it’s ‘80 and we’re all past that now. But yeah, I kept playing. No, go ahead and touch it. It doesn’t hurt…too..much…

Adrenaline junkie? Go hang-gliding. It’s like sailing, but in the air.

Smooth Tunes. Now, we’re not going to hedge you in. Yacht Rock’s just one way to keep smooth. If you break jazzy and sinister intellectual, then you’re a Steely Dan man. Doing drugs makes you a Steely Dan dude, too, especially because they’re loaded with lots of references to blow and smoking opium. Don’t listen to the lyrics, because then you might start to think, and that’s most definitely UNsmooth.

If you’re a little country, then you’ve got to hybridize with some Buffett, because that guy is all about smooth, but in a beachy kind of way. Weed and booze is pretty much what you’ll get here, so you might have to get a nice couch to do it right, because you’re not really going to be moving for a few years. Go ahead and listen to the lyrics, too: they’re great for your soul, because they’ll tell you that no matter what you’re doing at this moment, well, that’s just what you should be doing, and it’s all good as long as you grab a drink and just look at the waves, man.

And if you’re a bit more urban, well, right on, brother! Earth, Wind, and Fire is your ticket.

Be careful with getting into soul and r ‘n b, though: you might have to start dancing energetically, and that’s bordering on UNsmooth.

Backgammon. You don’t know how to play it. That’s cool. It comes in its own suitcase and has dice and a shaker, and there’s lots of smooth little pieces, so it must be good. By the time you start to play it with the lady, it’ll be too late to figure out the game anyway, so hammered will you be on White Zin and the fine Thai Stick you’ll be smoking. Suggest you settle your dispute over the “rules” with a kiss, and you’re suddenly playing the game you came to play all along and taking off those corduroys, Captain.

Speaking of…

A Captain’s Hat. Ironic? Sure. Serious? Damn right, because this crazy ocean of a life may throw every wave imaginable at you, sailor. You have to be ready, both mentally and spiritually, ready to tack and go where the wind takes you. No fashion decision makes this statement more clearly than the Captain’s Hat, showing that while you have some outlaw spirit, you’re no pirate: a leader of men, a lover of ladies, and yet married to the sea. (Plus: covers receding hairline.)

An Audi. It’s not BMW pretentious, but it’s still German. Other acceptable displays of your commitment to the automotive smooth: A Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, MG, or Fiat, the smaller and more convertible, the better, since you don’t want all that flyover state bulk weighing you down, and the wind’s got to tousle your hair or what’s the point of breathing, man.

Cocaine. You think energetic is unsmooth, man? Hell no: you level out the booze with blow, just to keep it smooth but tight, baby. Makes fixing the fondue twice as fun both because of the sudden energy you’ll possess in getting the kitchen CLEANER THAN YOU EVER IMAGINED IT COULD BE, but also because once the fondue is done and you’ve gotten the hot tub cranking, you’ll be a mad tiger by the fireside…but only if you call the tiger out, baby. Otherwise, I’m just another lamb seeking refuge from the wolves, lady.

Also: cocaine and a cocaine habit makes losing the “contemporary” house or houseboat really, really easy later down the road. Easier, in fact, than you could have possibly imagined!

Dallas. Oh, you know it’s trashy, but J.R. is such an unbelievable badass you can’t look away. He impregnates his brother’s sister, and then has her sent away? And then turned into a spinoff? J.R. spellbinds you by ruining Cliff Barnes’ life weekly, banging every foot-tall hairdo that walks into the room before spanking them in gratitude and sending them on their way, and in one season by overthrowing a third-world government. Toss in the endless string of tailored suits, the ice-blue eyes of a stone-cold amoral killer, and the evil but irresistable grin, and you’ve got the perfect way to chill out with a cold glass of champagne on your massive an inevitably brown couch on Friday night.

“Are you telling me you had nothing to do with that counter-revolution?” God, we wish that would be asked of us just once in our lifetime.

The Offseason Survival Guide