All That and a Bag of Mail: Tiger Tramp Stamp

I suppose there are worse places for a man to get a tattoo of his favorite team, but the lower back is close to the worst.

Oh, hell no, it's the worst.

Thanks to intrepid OKTC writer Meredith Hornsby, we now have this picture of an Auburn Tiger fan's lower back.

And it's real and spectacular.

The guy with this tattoo threatened he was going to report Meredith to her boss.

Little did he know that "report Meredith to her boss" meant "have his tattoo shared with hundreds of thousands of people."

War Eagle!

The most amazing question we have ever gotten in the mailbag?

I think your mind is about to be blown.

Back in November, I was asked whether it was cool if your wife or girlfriend hooked up with a former athlete and I gave you the Clay Travis athlete hook-up balancing test to determine whether you should be proud or not. It consists of three parts: 1. how recent was it? 2. what does hook-up mean? 3. how did it end?

"Robbie" is our beaver pelt trader of the week for this question which applies my factors:

Austin Burton writes:

"With Dooley killing it on twitter, what do you see him doing in the future?"

I don't think Dooley will ever coach again.

That's just my guess, but I doubt Dooley even knows for sure what his next step will be.  

I see him as kind of like Al Gore after the 2000 presidential election. When Gore lost that election he looked around and thought, "I don't really want to do this anymore." He'd ended up a politician because his dad was a politician and he'd been groomed for it his whole life and taken that non-dream of his as far as anyone actually has without winning the election. (Hell, Gore actually did win the election). I don't think Dooley felt the same kind of pressure to follow the family business as Gore did, but with a dad like Vince Dooley you're just immersed in football to such an extent that it's hard to escape its gravitational pull. 

Dooley tried to escape that gravitational pull by going to law school -- remember Al Gore worked as a reporter for a little while -- but then he realized that practicing law sucks. At least for a lot of us, it does. Look, there are many worse jobs than being a lawyer, but being a litigator is a never-ending slog of procedures, motions, and paper posturing. It's not very exciting at all. There are a ton of young litigators, myself included, who have been sitting in a law office and suddenly thought, "Wait a minute, am I really going to be doing this for the next forty years?"

So we look for other outlets. (For lots of lawyers that outlet is just alcohol. There's a reason so many litigators are alcoholics.)

For me, writing ended up being my escape. 

For Dooley, it was coaching.

For lots of you reading the mailbag while billing your clients, it's Internet surfing. We all have to escape from litigating. All of us.  

Dooley worked his ass off to become a head coach, ascended all the way to one of the best jobs in college football, and then, I think, realized he didn't love it as much as he thought he would. 

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he'll be back coaching, but once you've been to a top job, you have to absolutely love coaching to take a smaller job and try to work your way back up. Does Dooley really want to go back to work for Nick Saban, as I'm sure he could, and go through that grind to wait for another shot at the top? Does he want to move his family all over the country chasing that magic ring when he already grabbed it once before and found out it wasn't actually that magical?

I don't know, but I don't think Dooley absolutely loves coaching.  

Instead, I think Dooley will end up doing television. And I think he'll be outstanding at it. 

I've been arguing this for a while, how many coaches could take over for Lee Corso on College Gameday?

Not many, right?

How many coaches that are relatively young could take over Corso's job and do it for twenty years? Putting on the mascot head, riling up opposing fan bases, tossing off a zany one-liner, Dooley could do that with ease. Plus, he and Corso have similar career records, Corso went 73-85-6 in his tenure while Dooley is now 32-41. 

Those are almost identical winning percentages. 

So if I was ESPN I'd go after Dooley and groom him as Corso's replacement on College Gameday, I really would.  

Jackson Lowery writes:

"From last night's 3HL radio show, what would an example of a Clay Travis introductory e-mail on Match.com look like?"

Well, it would be determined by reading the profiles of the women I was pursuing.

And then it would be brilliant.  

For those who don't listen to 3HL, yesterday I guaranteed that I would have been an amazing Internet dater if I'd ever gotten to the point where I had to post a profile online to meet women. Which, to be fair, could have ended up happening if I was still single in my thirties and living in Nashville. It's not like there are tons of single, never married, normal women in Nashville over thirty.

But I'm not kidding about this, I'd be one of the best Internet daters of all time.

Why?

Because I would have killed on email.

And email is like 95% of Internet dating.

I would be in the 99% percentile of best male email daters.

See, most guys are awful at communicating and like half of men out there can't even type a semi-literate email. (If you doubt this go read my Twitter feed someday. And these are people with college degrees). There are sooooo many more smart women than there are smart men. Lots of women are reading this right now who have online profiles or are presently in the dating market and they're just nodding their heads.

And weeping.

Silently weeping.

It's amazing how many men are incapable of actually writing an entertaining, funny email.

Even a single funny email. You should have done that summer reading, losers.

Anyway, I would have killed at writing these emails. I mean, absolutely killed. In fact, I've never been accused of lacking for confidence, but I'm not sure there's anything I'd be better at in life than online dating emails.  

Plus, in addition to killing on emails, I'd meet just about every woman's online criteria. I mean, I'm not dashingly handsome -- I once asked my wife what my best physical characteristic was and she said, "You're smart and funny." -- but I'm six feet tall, don't smoke, only weigh 180 pounds, have an advanced degree, make a good salary, have never been arrested or fathered a child out of wedlock, and I'm not violent.

And I'll 100% make you consistently laugh via email.

If you can do all these things, you're an online stud.

I mean, I would have killed at this.

Doubt it?

Here's my single male competition, Heath A. sends this pic which includes this descriptive email:

My brother found this in the parking lot of a gas station in Florence, SC. Seriously. Nothing says “I’ll miss you while I’m in prison,” like a plastic ball from Dollar General. I’m just shocked that it doesn’t include “Roll Tide” somewhere on it.

What if this was Mike Vick's message to our mysterious mom's kid up above?

Have we cracked the case?

And, yes, I know this incredibly sad. Sign up for big brothers and big sisters. There are so many worthless dads out there it's a crying shame.

Lots of y'all on Twitter

"Does Mike Munchak keep his job?"

I think so, yes.

The better question is, does it matter?

And I think the answer to that question is, no.

Right now the Titans have the equivalent of a gut shot wound from the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg.

They're lying in the hospital right now thinking, "Why did Robert E. Lee send us over that open field?"

How well did that gut shot wound typically turn out for Civil War soldiers?

As much time as you spent changing the bandaging of the wound and pouring water down the mouth and putting fresh sheets on the bed, you still had a minie ball in your abdomen.

You were going to die.

Right now that's the Titans franchise.

Munchak is like the bandage, he doesn't really have much impact on the actual result.

By the way, this won't help things, but my relationship with the Titans has just gone off the fiscal cliff.

How bad is it?

I'm a season ticket holder who is on a radio show on their flagship station and the team didn't send me the season ticket holder gift this year, an Eddie George bobblehead.

They cut me off the list!

I know it's going to shock y'all that a 90 year old owner who doesn't even live in the city doesn't have the best grip on things, but the Titans are a big blue dumpster fire. How bad are the Titans right now? They make the University of Tennessee's management team look like Apple.

Sunday's game against the Jags is going to be the lowest rated and worst attended game since the franchise moved to LP Field.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I'm sure the Titans are dying of a gut wound.

Jesse H. writes:

"The past couple of years I've thought that some mid-major or small college should take a chance and hire someone that hasn't coached at the collegiate level but dominates in video game football. I've coached high school football in the past, but I dominate in video game football. No matter what platform-dating back to Atari and Intellivision I've been a force. I've won numerous championships, beat my friends in rivalry games, and have a career winning percentage around .800.

I was doing Les Miles type things while he was still in colleges. I run the score up like Switzer and Spurrier did in their glory days. I don't mind calling an opponent out and would be great at press conferences. Seeing as I don't have the required experience, I would be a cheap hire and bring a school some press. For my résumé I can send schools screen shots of my video game profile. Don't you think it's time a school takes a chance?

This is maybe the dumbest email idea I've ever gotten in the history of the mailbag.

And we've gotten a ton of dumb email ideas.

No, I don't think it's time for a college to gamble on its football future by hiring someone who plays video game football really well.

I can't believe I had to write this.

Note, I said college.

Bud Adams does, however, find your premise intriguing, but he needs to ask you more questions about this video game football of which you write.

Jim B. writes:

"Do you have more fun with the TMZ side of college football or the football side of college football?"

I have much more fun with the non-football side of college football than I do the football side of college football.

That's because no one actually reads about the football side of college football. I'm serious, I've seen the online numbers at Deadspin, FanHouse, CBS, and now Outkick. No one reads game previews. Hardly anyone reads game stories unless they're really well done.

The football side of football is a dead audience.

Not surprisingly, most newspapers focus on the football side of football.

There just aren't that many people who care about the actual football side, and those who do care have a billion options to choose between. Plus, we've all seen what happened in the game itself. Do you need me to tell you how Alabama scored or do you need me to tell you what it was actually like at the BCS title game in an entertaining way?

I focus on the latter.

If I had to rank what I like writing about the most, I'd rank funny the highest, absurd the second highest, business-related third, the coaches and their personalities fourth, ridiculous players fifth, sports media sixth, actual sports would be like fifteenth on my list. 

That's because you don't need to hear about actual sports from me. 

Not that often, anyway. 

What you need to hear from me is about how awesome I would be at Internet dating. 

Which is 100% true.