Didn’t I say it, folks? I did. I said we couldn’t afford to turn the ball over and there Ryan Grant goes and coughs up the pig-skin on the very first drive. I knew right then we were in trouble. Although that mistake only cost us three points, it was a sinister omen of things to come.
I kept wanting to blame the offense, Sunday night. We were still in the game up through the third, but they just couldn’t put enough points on the board. Couldn’t get in the end-zone, either. Christ, I had a nice big piece of cake ready to go for the first touch-down, but I had to wait a long, long time to finally eat it. It was that kind of night.
The defense played pretty well, but in the end they did not put enough pressure on Tony Romo. That team has got all the weapons it can handle, though. They ran us up on the insides and then slashed us on the outside with that rookie speed-demon. In the end they made us look all catawampus in front of the home fans and the rest of the television-set-owning world. I suspect they would have made just about anyone look that foolish.
Coach McCarthy said it simply enough on Monday: They are just more talented and playing better right now. Well, that was the case last season when we played them, too, but look who got to the NFC Championship game? Ahhh… Let us not go there. My apologies, dear readers.
Well it looks like the sting of defeat has gone and stung Mr. Al Harris right in the spleen parts. Ouch. As of press time here at Meat Packers Union, Harris is out for the season and maybe more with a serious internal rupturing.
You probably didn’t know this, but Harris hadn’t missed hardly a snap since the start of the 1998 season, including most since coming to the Packers as our shut-down corner. I guess you could say he was our defensive iron-man. Well, you could. Not so much now.
Of course I was yapping about how talented Tramon Vernell Williams is as a back-up after Harris went down, Sunday, and then he went and got burned up like a dry barrel of birch bark by the Cowboys fourth-string Wide-Out for a touch-down. Ain’t that your Tramon? my buddy queried. Yup. Some back-up. Guess he better be for real now. Lordy.
Anyhoo, the season is young and I guess we hit us a patch of rocky rapids that done cap-sized the canoe. It ain’t winter yet. We’ve got plenty of time to pull ourselves up on shore and dry out the cargo. Sometimes when you run through some thorny rapids you get dumped.
I’ll be heading up to the great Namekagon River Valley this weekend for our annual Red-Horse Sucker and Muskie adventure. Me and Silly Dean and The Warden are floating a wild stretch and camping on the shore for a few nights. We’ll catch us some red-horse and then use ‘em as bait for the big toothy critters who haunt the deeper pools. It’s a wild time, dear readers. I suspect we’ll hit some rocky stretches as well with the water running autumn-low. When you’re in the upper stretches of a river you’ve just got to be ready for that sort of treatment, and you’ve got to be ready to hop back in the current if you do go for a dip.
I have every confidence that Coach McCarthy will treat last week’s game as such. OK, boys, wring out your jerseys and get back to work, he oughtta say.
I probably won’t have time for a Tampa Bay preview column this week, so I’ll just say that we better shape up and run this next section or stream with poise. Ride the swift current to our third victory! Green Bay - 17, Tampa Bay – 13.
