As I write this mailbag I am presently flying to Los Angeles to tape our first ever college football preseason show for Fox Sports 1.
Guess who is in the aisle directly across from me?
Connie Britton!
After her Tami Taylor role on "Friday Night Lights," she's my favorite actress on Earth. She looks the exact same in person as she did on FNL and does now on "Nashville."
So I've already helped her put her bags up in the overhead bin. Helping Tami Taylor with her luggage is now the fifth greatest moment of my life. (1 and 2, birth of kids, 3. marriage, 4. passing the bar exam 5. putting Tami Taylor's luggage in the overhead bin.)
By the way, I always help women put their overhead bags in the bin and I was in line directly behind Connie on our Southwest flight. So I would have done it for any woman. And it's not like I bowled over ten people to get the luggage up top. (I'm actually less likely to help attractive women because I'm thinking that they're thinking the only reason I'm doing this is because they're hot.)
She was thankful for the help and now I'm sitting here trying to figure out whether or not to say something to her.
And I just Tweeted y'all to ask for advice.
And all of you want me to talk to her.
The top questions are: 1. What's happening with the "Friday Night Lights," movie? and 2. how is her hair so awesome? (Several women, including my wife and Fox colleagues Erin Andrews and Kris Budden asked the exact same question.)
So I'm going in now.
Wish me luck.
...
My opening line was, "Connie, I write and talk about sports for a living and I've just got to say, "Friday Night Lights" was my wife and mine's favorite show ever. We loved it."
She smiled, that beautiful Tami Taylor smile and said, "Thank you, so much," in a perfect drawl.
Having broken the ice and become that awkward stranger on the Southwest flight -- yes, she's flying Southwest -- A boarding group, what, what -- who talks to people they don't know, I had to follow up with the top two Twitter questions from you guys.
So I asked her if there would be a "Friday Night Lights," movie. She said she didn't know yet. I followed this up by saying, and I'm not making this up, "Erin Andrews loves your hair and wants to know what your secret is."
The answer?
"Never wash it."
I think she enjoyed the questions because we then shook hands. And this should come as no surprise but Connie Britton has the softest hands possible.
So this is no surprise, but Connie Britton is our beaver pelt trader of the week. She's as awesome as I'd hoped she might be.
How awesome would it be to have Connie Britton answer the entire mailbag one week?
Dare to dream.
Now on to the mailbag:
Bunches of you on Twitter and email:
"Everybody is doing college football top 25's right now, what would yours look like?"
I'll turn this into a column next week with our preseason Outkick Top 25, but here's my top five:
1. Alabama
2. Oregon
3. Ohio State
4. Georgia
5. Louisville
All five of these teams will be favored to win every regular season game this season. So I think they all have to be the top five. Alabama would be favored over every team on this list, but the Tide would be favored over Oregon the least.
So my preseason top two teams are Alabama and Oregon.
This means my predicted BCS title game is also Alabama and Oregon. (Note that I bet on Georgia to win the BCS title. That's because Georgia has by far the best odds of all the teams that are predicted to win every game. At 24-1 I like Georgia's payoff much better than I do Alabama's.)
I don't believe that Louisville has any chance at all to play for the title unless every SEC team loses twice and there are no undefeated teams from other major conferences.
I'll have the rest of my top 25 next week, but there's my preview.
Jared C. writes:
Got a friend (Vandy grad) who is having his first kid in November. A few buddies and I have invited him to Vegas for Labor Day weekend/week 1 of college football. We even lobbied for him to go as it would be his "dad-chlor party" or last time to party hard before kids.
He won't commit because him and wifey are going on a "baby moon." Baby moon is not yet planned, just something they are doing in late September.
We have all given him crap over not being able to go but everyone on the trip is pretty much single with no kids. We don't relate to someone saying no to a trip to Vegas, especially when it is a friend of ours.
Two questions:
- what should take precedent? Dad-chlor party or Baby moon? Extension of this question: should his wife allow/force him to go?
- how much does a guy's social life change after having kids?
The babymoon concept should be every bit as popular as a honeymoon. Probably even more so. I'm not kidding. The honeymoon is fine, but you and your wife are spoiled at that point. Hooray, it's just the two of us and you can take an awesome trip together. Chances are the two of you have taken an awesome trip before. And it's probably not the first time you've slept together anymore.
Conversely the babymoon is you and your wife's last chance to take a great trip before you don't have any control of your own life for the next several years. Given the fact that most of you will probably have more than one kid, the birth of the first kid is basically a decade or more of saying goodbye to fun adult trips. Sure, you can still take vacations, but the first time you take a young kid on an airplane or on a long car ride you'll understand what I mean. A baby changes everything.
Our first son was born in January. If I had one thing to do over again, I'd take my wife away for like two weeks and go visit somewhere awesome. Before you have kids you just don't understand how much your life will change. We should have done the babymoon.
So if your buddy has to choose between the dadchlor party or the baby moon, he has to pick the baby moon.
But here the calendars don't overlap.
So he should do both.
Finally, his social life will change a great deal. Kids are time vacuums. They just suck up whatever excess time you find in your life. I always love when people without kids talk about how busy they are. Stop it, no you aren't. If you don't have kids you are not that busy. Why? Because you control your free time. Once you have kids that's not true, they're the boss. (And you dog people, please stop with all your talk about how having a dog is preparing you for having kids. You are completely and totally wrong. It doesn't. Not at all).
Goose writes:
Clay,
This picture is awesome. So is the gift.
But this also reminds me of when the Jacksonville Jaguars team message was, "Keep chopping wood," and they left an axe in the locker room. Then the kicker almost chopped his leg off.
Thirteen machetes and alcohol, what could possibly go wrong?
John writes:
"In 2011, me and a few buddies rented an RV and drove up to Penn State for the Alabama game. We also had tickets to the Giants Redskins 9/11 opening game that Sunday in DC, so we had to leave early Sunday from Penn State.
Naturally, we woke up Sunday down a man and had to find him fast and get on the road. After scouring our phones, one buddy had a text from a cop saying they had found our friend face down in the mud and that he was at the Penn State hospital - All this guy does is down bottles of Jameson.
After getting to the hospital, I went in to check him out, but found him in the greatest attire I have ever seen on a grown ass man. He had a neck brace (for precautionary reasons only) and the only other thing on him was a giant, hardcore diaper. Of course, I had to go out to the RV and wake everyone else up so they could see this priceless moment.
We explained we needed to get him out immediately and the nurse said he could not leave until he could walk on his own, which she thought would be a few hours. Being entirely unacceptable, we spent a good 30 minutes doing everything possible to get him functioning. He finally came to and we got the nurse, who escorted him to the bathroom. Apparently the bathroom trip was successful enough for us to get on the road. The doc came in as we were leaving and said his BAC was .41 and it could have been a much different outcome if he wasn't a regular drinker.
We hit the road and made the game in DC. We now refer to this level of drunk as "diaper drunk".
Everybody has at least one friend -- and you may have multiple friends -- who just can't stop drinking once they start. I'm not saying occasionally you drink too much or don't eat enough or spend all day sweating in the sun while drinking, I'm talking about every time this guy has two beers he continues drinking until he's had twenty beers. And he or she's always your drunkest friend at all events.
The easiest answer is, and as hysterical as this story is, this guy probably doesn't need to drink anymore at all. And he probably knows this, which is why he's fighting it so hard.
I mean, if you wake up in a diaper in a college hospital with a .41 -- a .41! -- after the age of 22 you've probably got alcohol issues.
My advice would be, don't let him drink liquor anymore. Make him drink beer. Just consuming that much liquid is impossible for most people.
One of my friends used to drink a ton like this but then and all of this is completely true -- he got so drunk in Las Vegas that he was removed from Body English night club on a gurney. (Yeah, you can imagine how cool this was.) They then took him to the hospital in an ambulance.
If you get taken in an ambulance to a hospital for partying too hard at a bachelor party you know you've hit a low point.
None of us realized what had happened to him.
The next morning he shows back up in the hotel room, takes off his shirt, and he's covered in electrodes that they used to track his heart.
The doctor told him he was so drunk he could have operated on him without anesthesia.
The entire thing was hysterical, but also scary. Just like your story.
But this was years ago and to his credit this ended all absurd alcohol episodes for him.
Good luck.
Chris K. writes:
"Help settle an argument amongst friends: What are the rules surrounding hooking up with a friend's ex-girlfriend or previous hook-up? Is it purely a subjective, case-by-case analysis or are there guidelines to be followed? One school of thought is that it is never okay, but that seems extreme if the previous hook-up was minor or if there are other extenuating circumstances. Does the hotness of the girl play a role in your decision? Does it matter how "detailed" the hook up was?
In our situation, Friend A hooked up with Girl X off and on for a few months. She moved on and started seeing other people. A few months later, Friend A's good buddy Friend B started talked to Girl X and now they are hooking up. Friend A may have gotten a little hung up and is now becoming emotional with all parties involved."
I love the idea of a formal legal balancing test on the hook-up with an ex-scale. Lots of you law students who read the mailbag, this would be an outstandingly funny article for your law journal topics. No one is going to read that crap you're doing about the Hawley Smoot tariff. Give up that dream. Write something fun.
But to answer your question.
I think you have to consider several factors here, first is, how good of friends are the guys? Are we talking one of your best friends? Or are we talking you're still 22 or 23 years old and everyone goes out together in a group because you recently graduated from college together? Because those are entirely different levels of friendship. As you age you'll end up with a smaller and smaller circle of guy friends. So I think the level of friendship matters a great deal.
If it's two best friends, this is really tough. Because you say she broke up with him too. He might really like her and suddenly she's showing up at every event this guy goes to. He can't escape. Worse than that she's making out with his friend, showing up at the pool in a bikini, I can see why the jilted friend would be upset here.
So to sum up the first prong of analysis: Are you such good friends that you're going to be in this buddy's presence multiple times a week for groups of four or smaller? The better the friends you are, the less defensible this is.
Now, the second prong to consider is how detailed was the hook-up? That definitely matters. A bar makeout is completely different than an actual relationship where they were known as a couple. Some other questions to consider: Were they ever exclusive? Did they have sex? You need to know the answer to all of these questions before you can fully analyze the new relationship.
Finally, I think the third prong is where do you live. If you're in a big city, dating the exes of good friends without mutual consent is tough to accept. I mean, there are tens of thousands of available girls or guys. If you're in a smaller town, that's tougher because there might not be that many dateable partners. Plus, you might be really picky like OKTC editor Lori Kelly, who once remarked, "99% of men are completely and totally undateable."
Hope this helps, good luck.
Drew W. writes:
