Georgia Tech, Tennessee: Two Peas in a Shirtless Pod

Last week, we brought you video of the Tennessee football team posing shirtless alongside an orange Lamborghini. After tens of thousands of you stormed the YouTube ramparts, that video blew up and was eventually removed due to a copyright issue. Since that time the Georgia Tech football tam has posed alongside Bumblebee and Ironhide from the Transformers. Seriously. They couldn't even get Megan Fox to lounge on top of the car?

All of this serves as clear evidence, in case we needed any, that college football is perpetually stuck in the timeless year of 1988. As Andy Staples at Sports Illustrated pointed out to me, the cars resemble nothing if not the Trapper Keeper cars that you and I carried to elementary school. Back when we were all going to have our own Lamborghini as soon as we turned 18. How's that working out for you? Not you, Mark Zuckerberg, you Facebook-founding bastard, I mean the rest of us. Yeah, not so well.

I've made fun of these shirtless photos, but I decided it was time to play journalist and tell both sides of the story. How? By fabricating a defense of the photos from a Georgia Tech player. So enjoy.

As a prelude though Georgia Tech and Tennessee are being singled out for posing with fabulous sports cars, the shirtless team photo is a staple of athletic programs across the country. Why? I don't know. IIt's truly unbelievable. The only thing more unbelievable than the shirtless team photos is the shirtless team photos lounging on sports cars. What comes next year? I think porn stars need to be mixed in. So clearly I don't get this trend that has swept through college football. That's why having a Georgia Tech player defend the photo shoots was so important.

It's a monologue, so enjoy:

"Hey, you, yeah you, Clay Travis, the guy with the flabby chest, whom Bumblebee from 'Transformers 2' would look at and say, 'Hey, you with the flabby chest, you just don't get it.' Posing without our shirts is about team unity. So what if we all know what each other look like with our shirts off? We need to show everyone else in the country what the team looks like with our shirts off. How else can we win football games?

See, sometimes you gotta dig down real deep to win. In the fourth quarter, right after we hold up four fingers to show we're going to totally dominate the quarter, you might find yourself laying on the turf, spent, not really wanting to get back up for another play. But you know what, you know what makes us get up then? We think about our brothers, the guys we leaned on the windshield of a sports car alongside, and we get up. We pose, therefore, we are.

You don't know anything about brotherhood. You've probably never even gotten to ride in a car that's so awesome it makes you forget about your 1.2 GPA for 10 minutes. Really colorful sports cars are badass, like a bowl full of Jolly Ranchers that don't cost anything. Anything! Only with wheels.

And then we get to buy the pictures of ourselves and put them up on the walls of our dorm room, so people who already know what we look like with our shirts off can walk in and say, 'Damn, I look good with my shirt off.' And you know what else we do, we give those pictures to the chicks, man. They love the pictures. I've had a girlfriend for three years. You know what I got her.

Year one? Shirtless team photo.

Year two? Shirtless team photo.

Year three? Shirtless team photo. Signed.

Plus, do you know how many ugly girls go to this school? We gotta work outside the campus to get the really good looking girls. Atlanta's got a lot of them, but it's competitive. You gotta represent. Now I roll straight into bars with the team photo. Throw that mug down on the table at a bar, unfurl it like a magic carpet, say, "You wanna ride with a man that rolls with Bumblebee?"

Two words:

Chicks.

Dig.

It.



Not to mention, have you ever stood in front of a mirror, slowly exhaled, covered your body in baby oil, hopped in a tanning bed, repped out 468 push-ups and then flexed so you could see how ripped you look in the mirror? Probably not.

And sure, some people, such as Georgia players, see the pictures and they think, "What a bunch of homos."

But you know what we say to that? We flip it on them with our scientist brains. We Pythagorean theorem that bitch. We say, "Yeah, homo sapiens!"

Then we all dance around and say, "Hypotenuse, what, what!"

We're engineers, son.

Gets them every time, Clay. And if that doesn't you know what we do, we hold up the four and the five. You know what that is? The number of points we hung on those chumps on senior day in their own stadium. You know why we hung 45 on them?

Yep, shirtless team photo.

Judgmental guys like you make me sick. You probably had a problem with the full-frontal team shot we took in the shower too. Typical, you just don't get jocks. We're so straight.

Why?

Because we run the triple option. You know what the triple option relies on? Guns, like these boys. (Flexes bicep.) And tris like these (flexes calf), and rock hard abs like these (flexes abs.) Even our wide receivers are in good shape. And all they do is stand out by themselves and chicken fight with defensive backs. Because we don't throw them the ball! But you know what, f they needed to they could kill a man. They can open a Coca-Cola bottle by flexing their pectoral muscles. Can you open a Coca-Cola bottle by flexing your pectoral muscles?

Of course not. I bet you couldn't even crack open a Mr. Pibb.

Next year we're not going to get our picture taken with cars, though. We're all going to hold guns in our hands. I heard Florida tried to do it last year, but they were worried about probation violations with felons holding guns. So we're going to do it, point those mugs right at the camera. Maybe even squeeze off a few rounds just to scare the camera man. Show him who's the boss. We are.

Cameraman, he holds it up, we're all splayed out, muscles like rippling rivers in a stream, and you know, he doesn't say cheese. You know what he says.

'Say Bobby Dodd.'

I don't even know who Bobby Dodd is, but I bet he never had muscles like these. "

*Flexes*