Dowbrigade

The
always interesting New England Patriots have presented the Dowbrigade
with a difficult dilemma.  We had almost resigned
ourself to the rude realization that our attempt to compete in the ESPN
Fantasy Football League with an "All-Name" team was a misconceived and
doomed experiment from the start, and well-consigned to the dustbin of
brilliant ideas, idiotically implemented. And then, the Patriots had
to go and convince Martin
Gramatica to come out of retirement.

The idea behind the "All-Name" team is that over the
years, we have become regularly convinced (usually around the time of
the NFL college draft), that we can predict which kids are going to have
long and productive pro careers JUDGING BY THEIR NAMES ALONE! Some players,
we had noticed, just had football names, names we could see, in our mind’s
eye, emblazoned in headlines on the sports page, or scrolling, ticker-style,
across the bottoms of CRT and plasma screens across America.

Honestly, we asked ourself, could Bronko Nagurski, Dick Butkus, Larry Csonka, Tedy Bruschi, Bart Starr, Joe Montana, Lynn Swann
or Jack Youngblood (all Hall-of-Famers) have done anything OTHER than
play professional football.

So, in the preseason draft for our little, 10-team league,
our team, the H20town
Ids, would draft only players with solid, hard-hitting
football names, and easily win the division. That was the plan, anyway.

Unfortunately, by draft time, at 8:00 on a late summer
Saturday night, we were already deeply under the influence of a combination
of doctor-prescribed
and herbal remedies for the grab-bag of aches and afflictions from which
we occasionally suffer, and as a result our picks were more capricious
than coldly lexical. That is, instead of picking the players with the
best "football" names, we were picking the ones with the weirdest, funniest,
oddest or most difficult to pronounce names.

For example, our quarterback was Daunte Culpepper, and
right away we were in trouble. We breathed a sigh of relief when he was
finally knocked out of action in mid-season and we were free to choose
a replacement from among the dregs that none of the nine other owners
thought
worthy
to carry on their rosters. Our other selections included: T.J. Houshmandzadeh,
Antwaan Randle El, Muhsin Muhammad, Mewelde Moore, Keyshawn Johnson and
Jay Feely. (roster
here)

But the players we really lusted after, lexically speaking,
were the Gramatica brothers, Mart

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