Eight Feet Deep

Tommy Kelly lost his pants.

Such is a lede (lead) that could launch prac­ti­cally any clas­sic tale of the vul­ner­a­bil­ity or humil­ity of man. But here it is, likely for the Oak­land Raiders defen­sive tackle, a source of embar­rass­ment that will fol­low him for some time if not ensure him a place in his own locker room’s best jokes.

If you didn’t hear or see the clip on the Web, Kelly’s pants some­how fell off while play­ing in front of a CBS tele­vi­sion audi­ence and only 67,000 some-odd live peo­ple at Denver’s Invesco Field at Mile High Sun­day. At least the Raiders picked up a win, putting them at a grim 4–9-0 for the season.

No mat­ter how dis­con­cert­ing the inci­dent in which Kelly was em-bare-assed it is likely that only fools, drunks and drunken fools who aren’t foot­ball play­ers will bring up the mat­ter if they run across the Raider in per­son one day. At 6-feet, 6 inches tall and 300 pounds, yeah, only his fel­low pros might make him the butt of their jokes and then likely only those around his height and girth. Cer­tainly few place kick­ers will deride him.

But all kid­ding aside, it was an inter­est­ing and enter­tain­ing week in pro foot­ball. And sad.

The week­end games car­ried the shadow of Cincin­nati wide receiver Chris Henry’s death on Thurs­day. Henry fell out of a pickup truck bed dur­ing a domes­tic dis­pute. Such things shouldn’t hap­pen dur­ing one of the Ben­gals’ most promis­ing sea­sons after years of rare win­ning sea­sons. But they do and they did.

How­ever, the games go on and are big­ger than just one man. That is, unless you are Brett Favre. When his head coach wanted to bench the star Vikings quar­ter­back, the Methuse­lah From Mis­sis­sippi just wouldn’t go.

Then, no mat­ter how much the loud and the not-so-loud Saints fans were dis­ap­pointed, their unde­feated streak finally came to end with their loss to the Dal­las Cow­boys. Oh well, as I (a Saints fan) told an acquain­tance watch­ing the game, it’s not the Super Bowl.

As for my main team, the Tex­ans, well, they man­aged to climb their way out of the hole with a three-point win over St. Louis. There is hope for a wild card berth if they can win their last two games and a hole opens up and swal­lows half the AFC who knows what other teams have to win and which have to lose.

So why write about the NFL on Mon­day when I could write about the Sen­ate pass­ing their ver­sion of the health care bill and the cli­mate change talks in Copen­hagen? Are you nuts? It’s the NFL in December!