There are ideas, there are bad ideas, and then there's having a live Komodo dragon at your home football games. At least momentarily, that's what UAB athletic director Mark Ingram considered having for when the Blazers open their new stadium in the future.

Ingram should be credited with helping rebuild UAB's football program from the ground up. He's done a lot of great things for that program. However, this -- having a potential Komodo dragon exhibit -- would not have been one of them. AL.com did an extensive interview with Ingram, which you can read in its entirety here, and it didn't take long before the now-defunct plan came up.

The premise is basically that Ingram came from Temple, where the program would get a live owl from the local zoo to make an appearance on game days. Since having a live game-day animal worked at Temple, perhaps UAB could do something similar. During a chance meeting with someone from Birmingham Zoo, Ingram proposed the idea of having a Komodo dragon on game days. The reaction was, to say the least, hilarious. More from AL.com:

"They said, 'You understand this is basically like an alligator?' I said, 'No, I didn't. I thought it was more like a large iguana.' They said, 'No, it's a meat-eating carnivore and it'd be like having an alligator here.' "I said, 'Oh, OK, well maybe you could bring it, it could be in a cage? Because LSU and Memphis, there's a lot of people who have tigers like that.' "They said, 'Well, what about the spit?' "I said, 'I don't understand.' "They said, 'They spit at their prey and the spit causes paralyses. So, you know, they can go and eat it.' I said, 'So this is a bad idea is what you're saying?' "Children getting spit on and paralyzed, and eaten, potentially, by the Komodo dragon. I thought it seemed like a great idea, but apparently it's not as good of an idea as I once thought."

Apparently not!

This ended up being a fun anecdote instead of a tragic miscue so let's chalk it up to what it is, have a laugh and move on. Going forward, though, before anyone thinks about doing anything with a Komodo dragon, just know there are plenty of YouTube videos showing how gruesomely they wreck shop in nature. I'm not saying I've seen those videos, or that you should look for them, but they do exist. There's even a "Planet Earth II" episode depicting these things and the only relief amongst the horror is David Attenborough's alarmingly calm presentation of it all.