Over on the other site, I made up a sequel.

Never been a big fan of him but that was actually funny. Glad to see him happy… alright enough with all the bull shit make waterboy 2: nfl foosball coach.

I’ll take that pitch. Bobby Boucher has spent fifteen years as a weirdly effective football coach, with a folksy charm that everybody reads as wit and wordplay. He is in fact a moron. His brilliant gimmick plays come from not knowing the rules to football. It’s basically Being There but with Yogi Berra.

Then some disastrous morning-show interview reveals he may, in fact, be an impossibly lucky simpleton. The emperor has no clothes. His team is headed to the playoffs and the dickhead owner is looking for excuses to fire him. The second act is Bobby trying to prove he’s competent, which never goes as planned, but works well enough to keep him on until his team (naturally) goes to the Superbowl.

The act-three moral is that it’s okay to be dumb as hell about some things and really good at others, and that you can’t argue with results. Right before the big game the owner fires Bobby - who in a fit of rage lifts the man’s new car fully above his head and throws it into an adjacent river. He eventually gets his job back because of fucking course he does. 90 pages. Rob Schneider cameos. Gatorade sponsorship plus whichever NFL team bids highest. $500K for the first draft. Adam, call me.

The rival coach, played by Udo Kier, has never smiled. He is a football scientist. He can punt a perfect spiral. He coached basketball until he declared it “solved.” Naturally, he is offended by the puzzle of Robert Boucher Jr’s genius. His teams have lost every game against Bobby’s team. He took the Browns to the Superbowl and lost to Bobby.

The rival coach speaks of Bobby in reverant tones, like a trickster spirit or Dionysian demigod - until the instant he considers that he might just be an idiot. From there until the final game he knows exactly what Bobby’s going to try. He just imagines what an idiot would do, and he is always correct. He writes down all of Bobby’s plays ahead of time. At one point a frustrated Boucher throws water at his face and the rival coach catches every drop in his own empty cup. Bobby ultimately wins by stealing his future playbook and jumbling the pages. It’s enough to eke out a dramatic victory. The referees shrug off stealing the playbook, because… they’re his plays.

Coach Kier slowly smiles for the first time at a press conference, after his first victory against Boucher. Think of Agent Smith. Halfway through we cut to a reverse angle of the reporters silently growing horrified. In the back, Rob Schneider cracks open a sponsored beer, pours it on his eyeballs, and chugs the rest.

Bobby spent eight years in college. The team owner, scheming to undermine his beloved public image, asks if it’s a doctorate - no, he just took twenty-three semesters to get a bachelor’s degree. “Maybe we can quiz him alongside a real egghead. Show people the difference. What’s his degree in?” “Economics.” “Shit, there’s no way to tell.”

One promising new player figures out Bobby’s deal in the first act, so he can explain it to the audience in disbelief. Without the other players to comment and provide interpretation of Bobby’s absurd plans it’s obviously nonsense. Bobby may teach him the secret of angry idiot strength to keep him from telling anyone. Mostly that’s an excuse for more squealing beeftank antics on the field. The feelings Bobby tells this player to draw on reveal more of his fucked-up childhood.

His wife Vicki has been running interference this whole time. She joins him for most interviews and occasionally deflects. She misses the Good Morning America thing that exposes him because she’s very pregnant, which traces back to being his fault. He was amorous and giddy on a sponsored-brand cruise after winning the previous Superbowl. Eight months later, as the playoffs start, she’s carrying triplets who can kick over nearby furniture. She’s indisposed for most of act two except for various “you did this to me” cameos as a shallow stereotype of pregnant women.

Following the disastrous morning-show interview, Boucher has the nerve to ask her why she wasn’t there for him. Exasperated and out-of-character on medication, she says she’s gonna kick his ass, but then can’t get out of bed. She rubs her belly and points. The kids kick so hard the bed starts scooching toward Boucher, who flees. After the c-section she’s perfectly sweet. All three girls are healthy and the nurses learned to wear helmets.

Act one is the Superbowl, Browns v. whoever pays to be in The Waterboy II. The backstory is diegetic. It’s all recaps of this impossible season and the history between Bobby and Coach Kier, starring whichever real sportscasters want an IMDb page. Kier’s ESPN biography includes photos where he is stone-faced at his wedding, holding his newborn daughter, as a child at Christmas, etc. A clip from his final basketball game has him holding the O’Brien trophy beside a group of sixteen men arranged in ascending order by height. His own athletic career includes a West German bowling championship where he scored fifty-six strikes in a row.

The game itself is absurd. Bobby’s players are never where it makes sense for them to be, and yet it somehow works out. Kier at one point loses sight of Bobby’s quarterback, and as he turns to look downfield, the quarterback runs past him going the wrong way. Kier stares at the empty end zone and remarks, “Magnificent.” Bobby wins, somehow, and when asked what he’ll do next, proudly declares “I’m going to the Superbowl!” The crowd laughs and applauds.

Before the game, we get Bobby and Vicki’s routine that morning, establishing their relationship, their teenage son, and the fact Bobby is genuinely as thick as a brick. He lives in a comically nice house and treats the staff like houseguests he feels obligated to serve hors d’ouvres. They’re all played by Sandler’s actual friends, and with thick metatextual overtones that will never be acknowledged, they’re having a party on his largesse.

Bobby’s son is named Robert Junior Boucher Jr., Jr. He goes by BJ. After the game, when his parents take that cruise, he gets left with a babysitter. He is seventeen. Bobby asks one of his players if he could look after the kid, which the player reads as an excuse to let his kid in on the party that’s obviously happening at the player’s mansion. As Bobby drives off, this giant black dude and skinny Jewish boy look at one another sidelong. “You got weed, kid?” “I don’t know. You got money?” “Good answer.”

On the celebratory Celebrity cruise, Sandler, I mean Boucher, is lauded with praise by other guests. At one point he’s asked to speak to a group of kids doing whatever bizarre athletic crap you can do on a giant boat. Rock-climbing? Okay, sure. None of the kids buy his reputation. The employee who invited Bobby onstage excitedly interprets his nonsense as metaphor, but the little boys and girls are just confused. A few have damning questions which the cruise employee waves off before sending Bobby on his way. The supposedly positive experience with children spurs Bobby to ask Vicki about having more.

As the next season heats up, Vicki is very pregnant, and this is played for physical comedy at every opportunity. When she goes to a game and squeezes past people on the stadium stairs, she winces like she feels a kick coming on, and a man she’s brushing against goes flying ass-over-teakettle across the railing, flinging his nachos in the air. At point point she leans against a plexiglass bus stop to catch her breath, and a man seated on the other side has his wig fly off. She is slowly turning into Bobby’s mother and it’s giving him anxiety. Do you think panic attacks are poor fodder for comedy? I’d bet this film’s budget that Adam Sandler doesn’t.

The morning of the fateful interview, Bobby is running late, waiting on Vicki. His assistant says it’s now or never. Bobby opens the door a crack. She screeches “YOU!” and Boucher just about jumps out of his skin. She continues in a feral growl, “you did this to meeee.” Bobby carefully shuts the door. He says: “She’s sleeping.”

Kier’s eventual understanding of Bobby is so complete that it borders on psychic. When their teams face off in the playoffs, Coach Kier is conspicuously holding a frisbee behind his clipboard. In the final quarter he says, “Bobby will certainly call his ‘double triple reverse Hail Mary’ if his emotional state is anger.” A player asks, “What if he’s not angry?” Kier throws the frisbee across the field, where it sloooowly arcs to eventually hit Bobby in the nuts as he emerges from the locker rooms. Kier: “He is.”