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Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher likes to drop peanuts in his Coke and apparently this is a trend

Graham Watson
Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher drops peanuts into his Coke during ACC media days (@LakenLitman)

Call me naïve, but today was the first day I’d ever heard that putting peanuts in a bottle of Coke was an actual thing.

Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher shared this concept with the college football world when, while speaking to the media during ACC media days, he started dropping peanuts into his glass bottle of Diet Coke and the images hit Twitter.

I was confused. Did he know he was dropping peanuts into his Coke? Was this a nervous tick?

So, I asked one of my colleagues about this trend and this is the answer I got:

After some real research, I found that dropping peanuts into a Coke has long history that originated in the South.

From the Coca-Cola website:

Folks from Texas to the Carolinas partake in the sweet, salty goodness, while the custom seems to peter out in Virginia and disappears entirely by Maryland.

As for when and where Coke and peanuts first got together, there were several possibilities.

Although there’s no written record, the first package of peanuts may have been poured into a glass bottle of Coke as early as the 1920s. Packaged, already shelled peanuts from Planters, Lance and Tom’s began showing up at country stores and filling stations where the familiar contour bottle of Coke was already being sold …

“I think putting peanuts in Coke may go back to working people who may not have had a place to wash up,” (John Masters of Tampa) says. “If you’ve been working on a car and have grease all over your hands, you pour the peanuts directly in the bottle and they stay clean.”

(John T. Edge, Director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the Center for Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi) says that combining the two made it easier to drive a stick shift on the back roads of Central Georgia, while James Brown (from Enka, N.C.) thinks that the tradition may have begun in order to leave one hand free to smoke or to keep working.

“I don’t know how it got started,” Brown says. “But you sure can’t beat a cold Coke filled with a sleeve of peanuts when you want something to hold you over till suppertime.”

A Coke filled with peanuts? Really?

As a West Coaster who now lives in the Rockies, I get there are many things to which I have never been exposed — plantations, Bojangles, Krystal, good college marching bands, banjos, use of the terms “y'all” and “might could” in everyday vernacular — and now, apparently, putting peanuts in my Coke.

Shockingly, this seems to be a Florida State coaching trend.

Thanks to Washington Post

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Graham Watson is the editor of Dr. Saturday on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at dr.saturday@ymail.com or follow her on Twitter!