College coach gets his finger smashed in a rat trap after motivational tactic backfires

We can add a new entry to the genre of “hilarious motivational tactics by coaches that backfired.” This week USTA coach Jeff Traylor put rat traps loaded with cheese in his players’ locker rooms as a message to “not eat the cheese,” a motto that requires a lot of mental gymnastics to understand how it applies to football — but nonetheless it went bad when a player pranked his coach with one of the traps and smashed his pinkie.

“One of my smart aleck seniors loaded his back up, put it on the podium where I speak to the kids. I put my hand there and it, yeah ... it looks like my pinkie got smashed by a hammer. It would have killed a lesser man, but I’m okay.”

This got me thinking about how much damage this could have done. Traylor says the team purchased 112 rat traps to make their point, which is a large number considering most high-quality rat traps tend to be sold in one or two packs. This leads me to believe that UTSA might have purchased these, which sell in a six pack at an economic price.

You not only get the traps for about $2 each, but they have that classic rat trap design I think you’d be looking for to prove a point. I went to Victor’s website to try and learn more about the specs of the rat trap to see how much damage they would do to a human finger, and learned quickly that people REALLY like putting the photos of dead rats in the reviews of rat traps on pest control sites.

I didn’t learn how much this would hurt a finger outside of one user who said they slammed their finger in it and was lucky not to have had their finger broken — so that’s a good baseline. More importantly I found another review which was about using hot glue to attach peanuts to the traps.

I’m glad coach Traylor’s finger is okay. This rat trap metaphor SNAFU is funny, but nothing will ever come close to Jack Del Rio almost causing his punter to cut his own leg off with an ax.