Football players can’t get their own drinks. It’s odd. They appear coordinated but they can’t seem to master the intricate interplay between helmet, drinking device and mouth so universities have to hire dozens of waiters and waitresses to mingle with the players with the sole duty of squeezing streams of liquid through facemasks and into parched little throats.

It’s always bugged me that these players are such pampered babies that all they are willing to do in the getting-a-drink department is hold their mouths open. I have often wondered why these athletes seem so eager for a hit off one of those Gatorade bottles, then I heard about Tipsy Tech.

Byron plays corner for Tipsy Tech. Like everyone on the Tech roster, he’s been around the block. He got kicked out of a few schools; he got kicked out of a lot of bars. But Tech believes everyone deserves a second chance, so here’s Byron, hungover, sweating out another practice two days before game day. Almost all of his teammates are in the same boat, outcasts, drunks, riding the last-chance express. Football was supposed to be the way out, they all love it, but they all love the bottle too. With everyone trying to get clean, detractors of the school have started to call it 12-Step State. Regardless of who they’re playing, they always seem to be lining up against John Barleycorn.

Midway through practice, Byron is approached by a little boy with a water bottle. He’s surprised, he knows he’s not one of the regular waterboys. Turns out he’s the coach’s son, he had the day off of school and his dad brought him to help out. “Need a drink?” Byron says, “What is it?” “Gatorade.” “No thanks.” Byron heads off in the other direction looking for one of the regulars. When he spies one, the dude holds the Gatorade bottle up about a foot above the shoulder, as if ready to give Byron a hands-free drink the way the university primadonnas do on TV. Byron puts his hand up to stop him, “What is it?” “Scotch and soda.” Byron puts his hand down, tilts his head back and gratefully accepts the cocktail stream.

Last year Byron and his codependent teammates figured out there was no way they could get through practice, let alone the season, sober, so they pooled their money and replaced the university volunteers that served as waterboys (and watergals) with bartenders. Now the team typically plays like crap, but they’re much happier. Wins and losses are pretty much the same when you’re buzzed.

The team has three bartenders, uh, “waterboys.” They weren’t hard to find. Since everyone at Tipsy Tech is a recovering drunk there are all kinds of students with industry experience. They turn the ex-bouncers into linemen and the former saloon servers into waterboys and girls. They get course credit for helping out with the team. They serve up whatever they can steal or get cheap from Costco. Early on they discovered that beer wouldn’t work because it would either go flat or it would start to foam out of the little hole in the top of the green Gatorade bottles. Anything with fruit juice made the players heave and fancy drinks with multiple ingredients took too much time and energy – I mean, shit, these weren’t really bartenders. So what you had essentially was hard alcohol mixed with something clear – scotch & soda, gin & tonic, bourbon & water – to cut down on the smell of the hooch and to make the booze budget go farther.

Not surprisingly, the only games Tipsy Tech ever won were drinking games. The players always seemed in a big hurry to get back to the bench area. In one game they used all of their timeouts in the first three minutes of the game because the players needed a drink. Halftime in the locker room was always a lively affair and there would be singing and carrying on and the alma mater would get turned into an Irish drinking song. On most Saturdays, after halftime, it would be nearly impossible to get the players to go back out onto the field.

By the start of the third quarter Tipsy really started to live up to its name. There were a lot of illegal formations and too many men on the field and backfields in motion. Players would often put their arms around the officials and tell them how much they loved them. All the players were trying to get the attention of a bartender and, on one occasion, to express his gratitude for the prompt service of a female water girl/bartender, a drunk noseguard tried to shove a five dollar tip down her top. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for Tipsy players to offer the other team free touchdowns in exchange for a drink. It was a mess, but football has always had an element of the drunken brawl.

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Last week there was a college football game where the teams combined for thirty-one penalties – each team committed seven penalties in the first quarter alone. Have you ever watched a game and heard the announcer say, “Boy things are really getting sloppy out there”? I have, and when the guy was saying it they were showing a picture of the sideline, with lazy-ass players getting liquid squirts from servants in team polo shirts. And I wondered … About Tipsy Tech, about the things that may cause sloppy play and thirty-one penalties, about what makes players so eager for a drink, what makes them act like a bunch of baby birds in the nest chirping for a chewed-up piece of worm. Could it really be just Gatorade? Are football players really that stoked about electrolytes? I gotta believe that among the throng of college football managers and waterboys there are at least a few bartenders.