One of the most valuable but least common commodities in the NFL (and life) is self-awareness.
So give credit to new Lions offensive coordinator Jim Bob Cooter — he knows he has an tremendous name, and isn’t shying away from it.
There are plenty of things to ask a guy who gets promoted to play-calling duties midseason for a 1-6 team, but of course the thing we want to know the most about is how exactly James Robert Cooter came to this particular and wonderful identifier.
“I mean, that’s just — I didn’t make a conscious decision,” Cooter said, via Dave Birkett of the Detroit Free Press. “I think maybe my parents were really into marketing, so we were trying to sell some T-shirts from an early age.”
Cooter grew up in Fayetteville, Tennessee — not Hazzard County, Georgia — and has always gone by all three names.
“I haven’t really thought about branding, any of that stuff just yet,” Cooter said. “It seemed to be OK. But as I move around, I’ve been in a couple different cities at this point, it certainly — the farther north or west you get, away from the Southeast, it tends to get a little extra scare. So maybe I give a different name when I’m waiting on my sandwich or whatever that whole thing is, just to save that one.”
He can if he wants. I can promise you the next time I go into a Starbucks, I’m totally telling them my name is Jim Bob Cooter, just to see the look on some poor barista’s face.
“I laughed the first time I heard it,” Lions tight end Eric Ebron said. “You’re supposed to laugh. I’m not used to that Southern kind of name, three last names or whatnot. But that’s Jim Bob, man. That’s his name. We’re going to rock with it.”
We shall all rock with it. We are all Jim Bob Cooter.