10 Teams That Partied Too Hard

How do you know when you’ve partied too hard?

The answer is different for everyone. For some people partying too hard means a hangover and a miserable day at work tomorrow. For others, “taking a party too far” means “no work tomorrow” and “the authorities are coming.”

Athletes are people too—and they’re entitled to a little rum in the sun at the Holiday Inn from time to time. But sometimes their recreational partying turns into full-on debauchery and receives the kind of media attention the rest of us can only be glad we never have to face when we’re making that long walk home in another person's clothes.

From champagne blowouts to well liquor and sadness, the following examples of teams that partied too hard will make you reach for the ibuprofen and whisper a promise to a higher power that you’ll never do it again. 

The Minnesota Vikings "Love Boat"

I don’t care how many times Prince and I play basketball, I will never purify my body in the waters of Lake Minnetonka again after what Vikings quarterback Daunte Culpepper and his teammates did out there.

The Vikings’ "Love Boat" scandal that surfaced in 2005 was a sloppy and viscous affair involving booze, sex toys and naked women providing players with “moral” support on a chartered boat in full view of the captain and the vessel’s staff.

Four Vikings players, including Culpepper, were charged with indecent conduct, disorderly conduct and lewd or lascivious conduct—which is legalese for “In the captain’s chairs and on the bar counter? OK, this has gone too far.”

 

Russian Junior Hockey Team Gets Kicked off Flight

How do you know when you’ve been over-served? How about when an airline that wants your money tells your entire team you are too drunk to sit down?

That's exactly what happened to the Russian Junior Hockey team in 2011 when the world championship-winning squad boarded a Delta flight in Buffalo, N.Y. and was kicked off prior to takeoff for drunk and unruly conduct.

Now I don’t know how they do it in Russia, but maybe next time the coach should try to limit his children’s crusade to a single Mad Dog each until they at least get into international airspace.

 

The Dallas Mavericks Take over LIV

$110,000. On champagne. In four hours.

That’s how Mark Cuban rolls when he wins the NBA Finals. After beating the Miami Heat in the 2011 Finals, Cuban hit the after-party at Miami’s Club LIV with the rest of the Mavericks and the stacks started to fly.

Cuban dropped $100,000 in champagne on a single purchase of a $90,000 bottle of Armand de Brignac, size: Nebuchadnezzar. Yeah, the size of the bottle was so big its creator had to go biblical/Matrix-esque with the naming of its dimensions.  

Cuban and the team went over the top, but we can’t honestly say they partied too much—no one died or woke up next to a carnival worker, so we’ll allow the world champs of basketball a little excess.

Michigan Players Light Up a Loss to Appalachian State

Nearly five years after the Appalachian State Mountaineers' incredible victory over the Michigan Wolverines, an ex-Michigan player has come forward and told the rest of the story.

And the rest of story is that a number of Michigan’s players were impaired from partying the night before and intaking banned substances prior to kickoff.

So what did we learn today, everyone? Don’t ever write the underdog off. And never inhale.

The Boston Bruins’ Goliath Stanley Cup Bar Tab

Let’s get this straight—there’s no such thing as partying “too much” when you win the Stanley Cup.

But the Boston Bruins’ bar tab after winning the 2011 Stanley Cup tallied up enough damage on the credit card to warrant noting in this list. 

Before the night was over, the Bruins managed to spend $156,679 at Shrine nightclub in the Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut.

The most impressive item of the night was a $100,000 bottle of Ace of Spades “Midas” champagne that was given to the team to be signed and auctioned off by the Bruins Foundation charity at a later date. 

Now I know that takes $100K off the price tag, and that we all wanted to picture veteran forward Mark Recchi basking under a waterfall of “Midas” bubbly—but these guys essentially partied hard enough to get comped for the kids. And if that doesn’t get your respect, I don’t know what will.

 

The Miami Heat Have a Crappy Party and Lose to the Wizards

The shindig LeBron James put on last week the night before the Heat played the Washington Wizards didn’t look like a lot of fun—not compared to the team’s barn-burner “$200,000” night at LIV in Miami after the Finals this year, at least. 

But hey, on the bright side, at least they didn’t lose to the Washington Wizards—worst team in the NBA—the very next day. Oh, they did?

Well, we don’t know exactly if they were drinking hard or not the night before the game. But if I were James, I would tell everyone I know that Chris Bosh and I were cream-corned off of a bathtub of wine spritzers before admitting that I lost to the Wizards unimpaired and fully rested.

Philadelphia Flyers Crash Frat Party

You know you may have a problem when you’re a professional athlete and you and your teammates have to start finding drinking buddies at college fraternity mixers.

That's exactly what Philly Flyers players did after a game in 2008 when they headed to Old Town and moved in on a formal being thrown by a Temple University fraternity.

Players reportedly staked the place out, drank on the fraternity’s prepaid bar tab and schmoozed with any coeds who happened to wander too far away from their dates.

The fraternity’s president ended up being alright with the Flyers taking over the scene, saying “They were cool... one of the [players] there hit on my date, [which was] kinda funny because I didn’t get any.”

 

 

The “White House” Dallas Cowboys of the 90s

Well-endowed blondes filing in and out and women of all sorts running around the place in their “birthday suits”—that’s what was going down in the Cowboys’ “White House” during the '90s. 

The White House—a two-story home behind the team’s Valley Ranch practice facility—was a virtual grotto for the iniquity and misbehavior Dallas Cowboys players became synonymous with during their team’s golden era of Super Bowl runs in the '90s.

Miami University's Booster Blunder

“Everybody on that Goose, but I’m drinkin’ on that gin.”—Terrell “T-Buck” Walden, Miami Hurricanes cornerback and poet laureate of the Seventh Floor Crew.

After the scandal involving Miami booster Nevin Shapiro surfaced in 2011 and revealed the culture of nightclubbing and debauchery that had taken over the university’s football program this past decade, it’s clear to see that the team’s “Seventh Floor Crew” and their eight-minute “rap” were merely products of the most sauced-up and irresponsible era in Miami University athletics.

England’s Rugby Team Drinks Heavily, Attends Dwarf-Throwing Event

After a rough day on the pitch against Argentina in New Zealand, England Rugby’s team captain Mike Tindall and some his fellow teammates just wanted to relax and blow off a little steam.

But instead of knocking back a few quiet pints at a pub, Tindall and the team decided to “Emeril Lagassi” their evening and kick it up notch or five by heading to the classy “student-style” Altitude bar in Queenstown for cheap vodka shots, some good old-fashioned dwarf tossing and canoodling with women.

Naturally, fans captured every last second of the drunken spectacle on camera phones, and Tindall’s wife—Queen Elizabeth II’s granddaughter—wasn’t too happy when she found out.