Your Friday Hoo Doo Thread: Ole Miss

This week Ole Miss rolls into town for the first division test of the season. Yes, Alabama is heavily favored to win, but we need all the teflon we can get where injuries are concerned. Give us your best and please send your content to be featured in future Hoo Doo posts to RBRhoodoo@gmail.com. We need it.

Ground rules:

We know that you miss the Friday Hoo Doo thread, and that we are at least partly to blame for Alabama’s poor injury luck. The problem is, any one person has only so many stories to tell. I do not have the time or creativity to make something up every week just so we can have a thread.

I do, however, have an idea and modest proposal. None of these traditions are really about the writers anyway, they belong to the community at large. Why not feature some of your own infamous moments, in full color?

I have created a new email account, RBRhoodoo@gmail.com, for the express purpose of receiving Hoo Doo photo and video submissions. We will review them and select one each week during the season to feature. As usual, readers will comment below with their own tales.

The only criteria, being that this is a #familyblawg and all, is that all submissions must be PG rated. Please include a quick story behind the visual and permission to post. Videos will be published to Youtube if you send me a file, or you can send a link if it is already on the web somewhere that will allow an embed. Photos can generally be uploaded with no issues. Also, tell me how you wish to be credited, by name or your RBR username.

This week’s cover offering comes from reader Robert Kendrick, who has a tale of motivation:

My son Will is seven years old and playing tackle football for the first time. Like all Alabama brain washed kids he learned to say Roll Tide right after Momma and Daddy. He knew much more football than most other kids at seven but as Saban often says, there is no substitute for experience. I coached the defense on his team and one of the things the kids have to learn is toughness, I don’t believe this comes naturally for most people. Unfortunately for my son he had to ride in the car home with his defensive coach after practice each day. As a defensive player I wanted our team to be feared by the opponent much like Saban says about Alabama, the Alabama Factor.(Only several years before Saban came to Bama)

I noticed at practice my son avoiding contact when a play went to the other side of the field, basically running around blocks and avoiding contact. I had a talk about it with him, don’t get the wrong idea, I wasn’t mean to him just trying to figure out a way to help him remember it’s a contact sport. During our talk I told him that if I saw him running around blocks and avoiding contact that I was going to have his mother’s name put on the back of his jersey. He looked at me with terror in his eyes, he believed that I would actually do this. I never once saw him run around a block or avoid contact again. He became probably the hardest hitting pound-for-pound defensive player in the league and for all his years of playing.

That was in the year 2000, 19 years later and we still laugh and joke about the day he was afraid he was going to have to play a game with his mother’s name on his jersey.

The pic is from a playoff game in Texas Stadium, before Jerry World. I’m not yelling at him, he made the calls in the huddle and he is listening very closely to instructions to take to the huddle. His name is on the back of that jersey and he was very proud and felt he earned what was printed on the back.

That’s a great story. Whatever it takes to get ‘em focused, coach.

May this, along with all of your confessions in the comment section, be sufficient to get us through another week with a comfortable victory and no major injuries.

Hoo Doo away, for the good of the team, and think about any photos or videos you have to submit to Football Loki in the future.

Roll Tide.