1. Staying at the office all night “watching” football on the internet is better in theory than in practice, especially when: (a) your internet connection in Vietnam is too slow and buggy to really watch streaming video; and (b) even after you determine you’re not going to be able to watch the games you wanted to watch and would really just like to go home, you can’t leave the office because the maid is asleep and has already put down and locked the big security gate behind the glass doors for the night (I mean, I could have woken her up and gotten her to let me out, but it would have been a big ordeal so I just stayed there at the office).

2. Our office floor is very hard. Especially when you have no mat or blanket or anything and are using an empty bookbag and shirt for a pillow.

3. “Watching” football games via ESPN’s Gamecast (which shows the various drives graphically on a field in near real-time) and listening to games over internet radio is not really as enjoyable as watching them on television.

4. You really get a sense of how neat the internet is, and how small the internet makes the world, when you’re locked inside of an office in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam at 4:00a.m., yet you’re chatting on Google Talk with a buddy who is watching the Tennessee vs. Kentucky (Tennessee won 52-50 in 4OT, thereby preventing UGA from playing for the SEC Championship – boo!) and UGA vs. GA Tech (UGA won 31-17, making it UGA’s the seventh straight win over arch-in-state rival GA Tech) games from the Taco Mac in Decatur, Georgia – and he’s chatting from his iPhone to boot.

5. If you want to retain your job as head football coach at Ole Miss, you apparently cannot: (a) have an overall record of 10-25 over your three years as head coach; (b) have an SEC record of 3-21 over that same time period; (c) go winless in the SEC for the first time since 1982; (d) in the final week of the season, have 20 of your players get in trouble for stealing pillows and clock radios from their hotel rooms [Which, by the way, has to be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard in my life. Did they think that no one would notice that there were pillows and clock radios missing from 20 hotel rooms when the Ole Miss football team checked out? Did they think that the hotel and/or coaches would not be able to figure out which players stayed in the rooms in which the pillows and clock radios went missing? I just don't get it.]; and (e) lose the final game of the season against your arch-in-state rival, Mississippi State, after leading 14-0 with 10 minutes to go in the 4th quarter, making a bonehead call to go for it on 4th and 1, not converting the first down, and somehow managing to allow Mississippi State to then hang 17 unanswered points on you to end up losing 17-14. On Saturday, one day after that loss to Mississippi State, Ole Miss pulled the plug on Coach Orgeron.

I kind of liked Coach O in a weird way. He was definitely a weird guy – see the purported incident I blogged about earlier where he took his shirt off at a team meeting and challenged the entire team to a fight, etc., his Hummer commercial, etc. – but he was intense enough to kind of make up for it. [My good friend McGehee, who still lives in Mississippi, and I always threatened to go over to Oxford sometime during the off-season to try to meet with Coach O and have our photo taken with O in the middle glaring and pointing at the camera and with McGehee and me on either side of him, also glaring at the camera but with our arms crossed across our chests. Not going to happen now.] My support of Coach O had started to wane this season – I understand you have to start somewhere in the rebuilding process, etc., but how could we still be that bad?!? – and after the inane pillow/clock radio theft incident and the Mississippi State debacle I was all for firing him. In any event, it will be interesting to see who Ole Miss brings in as coach now. My initial feeling is they should bring in an old-school disciplinarian who is not going to tolerate any foolishness off of the field and who will focus on coaching good, fundamental football, but we’ll see. If nothing else, they can bring back Billy “The Dog” Brewer.