IT IS TIME TO HONOR GEORGE O’LEARY

Fresh off the season where he started 0-8 (including a loss to Furman where UCF only threw for 98 yards on 30 attempts) and then retired so someone else could eat the last four losses, George O’Leary is getting a statue. True, O’Leary’s also the coach who led the Knights to a Fiesta Bowl win in 2013, and he’s responsible for every bowl victory in program history. He’s also responsible for every bowl loss in program history, and there’s the whole thing where he talked about how soft players are these days a few weeks after a court reduced the judgment awarded to the parents of Ereck Plancher, who died during UCF conditioning drills.

But hey, all coaches have mixed legacies, and sculptors gotta eat. Fortunately, we’ve been offered an exclusive look at the proposed design for O’Leary’s statue. Let’s look at some of the more interesting design choices.

A. Using top-of-the-line technology, the artist was able to capture an exact scan of George O’Leary’s face and body, accurate down to the smallest detail. The shorts were added in the interest of modesty, though those present for the scanning session describe O’Leary’s ass as “more beautiful than every national park combined.”

B. O’Leary’s Congressional Medal of Honor, awarded to him in 1989 for kicking the Berlin Wall down while wearing penny loafers.

C. A representation of the first baseball bat, crafted by O’Leary as a young boy when he invented the game in his backyard. At the time, local media referred to baseball as Georgesport, but he insisted the name be changed when he reached high school, as he was busy inventing football and considered his childhood creation to be “meant only for the asthmatics and cowards unwilling to get hit in the ribs.”

D. The tattoo O’Leary got in 1992 after his marriage to Janet Jackson, which occurred on the same day Rhythm Nation 1814 was certified 6x Platinum. It’s long been rumored that O’Leary wrote most of the songs on the album and was a major influence on the music video choreography.

E. A lion’s skin, which O’Leary was known to bring to libraries as proof that he’d killed Aslan. Those kids cried, but they also grew up ready to face the harsh reality of the world, didn’t they?