Philadelphia ? Your only defense is that you were too drunk to remember what you did, and your only corroboration comes from the ex-stripper who spent the night in your hotel room. Sorry, Mike Price, but that’s pretty much the definition of busted.

The Alabama football coach who never got to coach Alabama football is making noise about fighting his termination. He might better serve his long-term interests by shutting up and going away for a while. A little hiatus might result in another college’s taking a chance on him.

Alabama, which hired Price in December, fired him this week after an astounding series of events in Pensacola, Fla. Former Crimson Tide quarterback Mike Shula — son of Don — was hired Thursday night. Shula, an assistant with the Miami Dolphins, has it made.

It’s going to be a lot easier standing up to comparisons with Bare Client than Bear Bryant.

Along with Monday’s resignation of Iowa State basketball coach Larry Eustachy, the Price episode has been packaged as a kind of “Guys Gone Wild” exacta, with heavy consequences.

Price blew a seven-year, $10 million deal over a few drunken hours with a bunch of strippers. Eustachy’s beer-sodden smooches of some college women at parties cost him almost $9 million over the eight years remaining on his contract.

Eustachy is 47 years old. Price is 57. They lost a combined $19 million by getting a buzz on and acting like a couple of spring breakers in Cancun.

Maybe it used to be possible for high-profile employees of state universities to behave like idiots in public. But there’s this thing called the Internet now. What used to be gossip among a few insiders now quickly becomes grist for chat rooms and message boards seen by thousands of people all around the world. Apparently, Price and Eustachy were too busy with Xs and Os and T&A to notice that times have changed.

The Price story leaked out via one such message board, spreading into a toxic spill on sports-talk radio. The photos of Eustachy playing the role of fraternity house lady killer Otter in an impromptu reenactment of “Animal House” circulated on the Web before being picked up by the Des Moines Register.

You can debate whether such behavior by married, professional role models should be grounds for dismissal. You can argue that everyone makes mistakes and that these guys should be given a second chance.

When you get down to it, both of these guys deserved to be fired for simple stupidity.

Eustachy is grinning right into the camera wielded by a Missouri student. In fact, he’s sloppily kissing the young women in question for the benefit of the camera. For good measure, he’s holding up a can of beer as if getting paid for product placement.

Price can act outraged by the various reports and versions of what happened, but he’s the one who left himself open to this by allowing Thursday night’s stripper to stay in his room, running up bills on Alabama’s tab. No matter what 12-step program Eustachy chooses, there he is on the front page of the paper, drunk and hanging all over women young enough to be his daughters.

You can say that $19 million plus two previously sound reputations equals too high a price for such mistakes. But then, Price and Eustachy knew what they had at stake when they hit the town. They took it for granted and now it’s gone. That’s almost as sad as it is stupid.

Almost.