Overly Earnest Breakdowns of Movies About College Sports: The Waterboy

How accurately did Adam Sandler's movie about a college football underdog with an unlikely star reflect the realities of the sport at the time?

Welcome to Overly Earnest Breakdowns of Movies About College Sports, a series where we do exactly what the title says.

Here, we’ll take some of the most well-known movies about college sports across the history of American cinema and analyze them through an undeniably tedious and nerdy lens. These screenwriters and directors are putting together movies, not documentaries, but whether it’s out of laziness or an understandable sacrifice to craft a compelling narrative, many of these films, enjoyable as some of them are, aren’t entirely accurate when it comes to depicting a realistic version of big-time college football or men’s basketball.

So that’s where we come in. Over the course of this series, which will run periodically, we’ll dissect a movie to see how precisely it details this enterprise we all know and love. What’d they get wrong? Where do they deserve some kudos? And what’s hilariously off?

If you’ve got any suggestions for this exercise in absurdity, feel free to sound off in the comments or email me at craigmeyer19@gmail.com

First up, we’ve got The Waterboy.

Starring: Adam Sandler, Henry Winkler, Kathy Bates, Fairuza Balk, Jerry Reed, Lawrence Gilyard Jr. (shoutout D’Angelo Barksdale)

Release date: Nov. 6, 1998

Budget: $23 million

Box office: $190 million

Synopsis: Bobby Boucher is a 30-something water boy who lives with his overbearing mom in a shack in the Louisiana Bayou. After being fired by the University of Louisiana, the latest indignity in a life mired by bullying and slights, Boucher takes his talents to the lowly South Central Louisiana State University Mud Dogs. There, he discovers that by using the anger he has bottled up after years of torment from others, he’s a ferocious, tenacious and hard-hitting linebacker. He suits up for the Mud Dogs, establishes himself as one of the best players in college football and leads his team on a magical run to the Bourbon Bowl, where they upset Louisiana and Boucher is named the game’s MVP.

Rotten Tomatoes score: 33%

Notable reviews

“This juvenile, unnecessary, and utterly pathetic madness can barely be considered a comedy; the jokes are so immature and flat that it more closely resembles a tragedy.” Mike Massie, Gone With the Twins

“This escapist comedy is so cheerfully outlandish that it's hard to resist, and so good-hearted that it's genuinely endearing.” Janet Maslin, New York Times

“A predictable, formulaic, dumb comedy that has about as much depth as Bobby . . . unless you think of it in Forrest Gump terms, and then it begins to get a little less offensive and a little funnier.” James Plath, Movie Metropolis

“We've got somewhat entertaining trash here.” Peter Stack, San Francisco Chronicle

“As a satire on the only true religion of the American South -- football -- The Waterboy is delightful.” John Haslett Cuff, Globe and Mail

“The Waterboy should have been sacked long before it reached the theater.” Kate Manning, Palo Alto Weekly

“You can lead Adam Sandler fans to "The Waterboy," but you can't make them think.” Julie Hinds, San Jose Mercury News

“Charming!” Gary Thompson, Philadelphia Daily News

“Really dumb, but many teens love it anyway.” Nell Minow, Common Sense Media

Is this school(s) real?

No, they’re not. There is a University of Louisiana, but it’s the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and their nickname is the Ragin’ Cajuns, not the Cougars. There is no South Central Louisiana State University, which we’ll henceforth shorten to SCLSU because that’s a goddamn mouthful to type out.

Well then who might it be?

Louisiana is clearly a stand-in for LSU, the largest, most domineering program in the state, though for all the talk of the championships the Cougars had won under coach Red Beaulieu, LSU hadn’t captured a title since 1958 at the time the movie was made.

SCLSU is a little trickier to deduce. Based on their schedule and their ultimate participation in a bowl game, the Mud Dogs are an FBS team (or what was then known as Division I-A). Outside of LSU, there are four FBS football programs in Louisiana – Tulane, Louisiana-Lafayette (which just goes by Louisiana now), Louisiana-Monroe and Louisiana Tech. It’s not Tulane, which is a private school and in a major metropolitan area in New Orleans. Louisiana-Monroe and Louisiana Tech are both in the northern part of the state, not terribly far from the Arkansas border, which would eliminate them from consideration. That leaves us with Louisiana-Lafayette, which is a state school in the south central portion of the Louisiana boot.

At the time the movie was made, the Ragin’ Cajuns, which were representing what was then known as the University of Southwestern Louisiana, were coming off a 1-10 season and from 1997-2000, they posted a 6-38 record. 

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got our match.

Now, on to some takeaways…

There’s no way Coach Klein would have been kept around that long

In the film, Winkler plays Coach Klein, the Mud Dogs’ hapless leader. Once a standout assistant at Louisiana, his green notebook full of inventive and effective plays is forcibly taken from him by Beaulieu as the two vie to replace the program’s legendary outdoing coach. With the playbook in hand, Beaulieu gets the job and fires Klein, who suffers what appears to be a mental breakdown before surfacing at SCLSU.

This is where a few questions need to be raised. Klein even being hired by SCLSU seems implausible. While a nice and pleasant man, he’s very clearly haunted by his past trauma, which not only affects his everyday communication with others, but effectively makes him forget everything he previously knew about football. How, exactly, did that interview process go?

More notably, though, the Mud Dogs are bad – I mean, really, really, really bad. With Klein ostensibly at the helm throughout, it’s noted early in the movie that SCLSU is on a 40-game losing streak dating back to 1994, which is eventually extended to 41. Even in the late 1990s, when there was more patience with football coaches from university administration, a coach of an FBS program isn’t holding on to his job after posting, at minimum, three straight winless seasons. The longest losing streak in FBS history belongs to Northwestern, which dropped 34 in a row from 1979-82. Twenty games into that skid, the school fired coach Rick Venturi.

There’s little reason to believe that Klein – who doesn’t seem to have the respect of his players, openly reads “Coaching College Football For Dummies” on the sideline and randomly hangs out at on-campus parties – would be able to remain employed for that long, even in a fictional universe.

That said, the deck was stacked against him

Seriously, how does an FBS coaching staff only have one assistant? Before he was cut off by Boucher, Klein appeared to be mentioning that they were the poorest program in college football. There’s every reason to believe him. Before Boucher arrives, there’s only one other staff member, an unintelligible, overall-clad farmer. The team has cheap-looking jerseys and there aren’t enough helmets for all the players on the team, with Boucher having to wear the kicker’s single-bar facemask up until the Bourbon Bowl. The water he was serving the team looked all kinds of unsanitary and prompted Boucher to offer his services for free.

When all of this is added up, it’s easier to believe how Klein was ever hired. This is a school that clearly stopped caring a long time ago.

SCLSU out-kicked its coverage with its schedule

At an institution of higher learning that hydrated its players with contaminated water from a rusting barrel, continued to willingly employ a historically bad coach going through an eternal mental health crisis and watched as its cheerleaders and mascot got blackout drunk on the sideline during games, SCLSU administration excelled in at least one area – scheduling.

The Mud Dogs’ schedule was filled with much bigger, more prestigious programs, some of which actually agreed to play on the road in a 6,000-seat stadium that in real life had a Florida high school as its primary tenant (it has since been fixed up and now also hosts Stetson University’s football team). 

In the season finale, a 9-3 win that sends SCLSU to the Bourbon Bowl, they’re hosting Iowa, which was coming off a three-year stretch in which it went 24-12. Since 1989, the Hawkeyes have played just two road games against non-Power Five teams.

SCLSU’s slate also included games against Clemson and Louisville, though the Cardinals were just a 1-10 team toiling away in Conference USA at the time the movie was filmed. While Clemson wasn’t the juggernaut it is today, it was coming off back-to-back Peach Bowls and had won a national championship within the previous 20 years. That success makes this quirk of the movie that much stranger – in a newspaper article shown on screen detailing the Mud Dogs’ win against the Tigers, Clemson is said to have been on a three-game win streak entering the matchup, which was described as an impressive run for a program that was in just its fifth season of existence (it has fielded a team since 1902).

Though they weren’t explicitly named, we can make some semi-educated guesses about at least a couple of the other teams they played. One program had black and yellow colors and a star on the side of its helmet, which would potentially be Vanderbilt given that much of SCLSU’s schedule was against southern teams.

An opponent is later shown fielding a punt in a baby blue helmet and a jersey featuring numbers with a shadow, which could be North Carolina given the style of uniforms the Tar Heels wore at the time. To further back up that point, Boucher is shown in the next scene speaking at the football camp of Lawrence Taylor, North Carolina’s most famous NFL alum.

Based on the teams they played, it’s fair to assume SCLSU was an independent program, particularly since three Louisiana schools, including Louisiana-Lafayette, didn’t carry a conference affiliation at the time. Even with that schedule flexibility, it’s remarkable who they were able to get to agree to play them.

Impressive as that competition was, it can’t explain away one of the film’s more glaring oversights.

How did SCLSU get into a major bowl game?

The Bourbon Bowl itself is a bit of an oddity within the movie. In a fictional SportsCenter clip, Dan Patrick describes it as “the first-annual Bourbon Bowl,” though players are later shown wearing patches to commemorate the bowl’s 50th anniversary that year.

Given its location, the importance attached to it and a powerhouse like Louisiana participating in it, this game is likely akin to the Sugar Bowl, a BCS/New Year’s Six bowl played annually in New Orleans. So how did a team that lost to Western Mississippi and never scored more than nine points in the games shown to us make it to one of the most sought-after stages in the sport? 

It defies logic that much more based on what teams with similar resumes faced during the actual 1998 college football season. Tulane, with an unblemished record that made it just one of two unbeaten teams that season (eventual national champion Tennessee was the other), only made it to the Liberty Bowl, where its reward was a matchup against an unranked BYU team. Two other teams from outside the power conferences also finished with one loss, like the Mud Dogs – Marshall and Air Force, both at 11-1 – but they couldn’t do better than the Motor City Bowl and the now-defunct Oahu Bowl, respectively.

Then again, this was college football in the pre-BCS era (at least at the time of filming), so it’s quite possible that under the arbitrary bowl system of the time, the draw of Boucher and the possibility of putting him up against the team that fired him as its water boy was too juicy to pass up.

Boucher was short of the goal line on his winning touchdown against Iowa

Seriously, check the tape.

Also, why dive down there? Pass by the pylon, Bobby!

The fake transcript plot line has some major holes

One of the movie’s biggest narrative twists is when it’s revealed that Boucher, who had been home-schooled by his mother and her questionable curriculum, got into SCLSU with a fake transcript submitted by Klein. It’s a transgression caught by Beaulieu, who notifies the NCAA and gets Boucher declared ineligible.

The process of the investigation and ruling is odd enough – including how the NCAA revealed its findings in a letter sent to Beaulieu, the Mud Dogs’ opposing coach in their upcoming bowl game, and not the actual parties involved in the probe – but the opportunity for redemption presented to Boucher is something the NCAA would never allow. In the film, college sports’ governing body decides that if Boucher can pass a high school equivalency test, he can play in the Bourbon Bowl and seemingly everyone else involved avoids punishment.

It’s an offense that never comes with such a lenient solution. When it comes to matters of academic fraud, the NCAA is never so forgiving and, for all one can say about the NCAA, it’s one of the situations where it’s hard to say they’re wrong. Acts like the one Klein committed usually result in serious punishment to the offending party and irreparable reputational damage to the athlete.

An Arizona assistant men’s basketball coach allegedly put together fake transcripts for incoming recruits and for that and other rule-breaking, he was sent to prison. Derrick Rose’s fraudulent SAT score helped result in Memphis having a Final Four vacated. After it was discovered that a suburban New York community college basketball coach had been doctoring players’ transcripts, the school shut the program down for two years.

Shouts to Boucher for knowing what year electricity was invented – because I sure as hell don’t – but answering questions like that wouldn’t spare him and the SCLSU program from the NCAA’s wrath.

What were Boucher’s NFL Draft prospects?

It was mentioned earlier in the movie that he was 31 years old, meaning he’d be 32 by the start of his rookie season. At the end of the film, shortly after his wedding, he expressed a desire to return to school, meaning that if he finished all four years of college, he’d be 35 years old by his first NFL game.

Boucher wouldn’t be an average football player in his mid-30s as his late arrival to the sport meant he hadn’t accumulated years of bruises, broken bones and torn ligaments, but once you’re old enough to run for president, your body starts to quit on you in unavoidable ways no matter how little football you played.

On the other hand, we’re talking about a league with teams that once decided it was a good idea to spend first-round picks on Brandon Weeden (29 years old at the time he was drafted) and Tim Tebow (can’t throw a football), so why not show Boucher some grace?

Boucher’s NCAA single-game sack record still stands

He had 16 sacks in the season-opening loss to Western Mississippi, which is 10 more than the next-closest player racked up in a game. Trust me, I looked it up. Mom and Dad, don’t worry — my journalism degree is being put to good use.