Brett Favre walks into a bar. Bartender reaches down, grabs a shotgun, shoots Favre right between the eyes, sending skull fragments flying in all directions and leaving nothing but a gurgling stump. He then goes into the back room, grabs an industrial-strength 10-ply garbage bag, fills it with the headless remains, drags those out back to his pickup, and drives them to the nearest landfill, where he dumps the bag at the base of a mountain of garbage 200 feet high.
The next day, ESPN goes back to covering baseball.
That’s it, that’s the joke. Brought to you courtesy of someone who is sick to death of hearing about Brett Favre. So an extra-juicy fuck you to Eric Mangini and Brian Schottenheimer this week for bringing that backwoods media cancer into our AFC East. You both suck. Not that you didn’t before, but now you really suck.
And now, on to sports crime. While we’re on the subject of football, let’s all give a special shout-out to old friend Tebucky Jones, former New England Patriots safety and would-be hero of Super Bowl XXXVI (if Willie McGinest hadn’t been called for holding Marshall Faulk on the goal line in the third quarter, Tebucky’s fumble recovery/TD would have been the clinching play). Pats fans everywhere remember “T-Buck” (not to be confused with the other Belichick-era “T-Buck,” Terrell Buckley) as a key figure in the Patriots evolutionary story: the missing link between the Pete Carroll and Bill Belichick regimes. Jones was perhaps the crowning achievement in the dubious career of one-time Pats personnel chief and notorious draft-pick waster Bobby Grier — he spent a first round pick on Jones, a college running back converted to safety at Syracuse, with the idea of turning him into a “massive press corner.” As Jacksonville’s recent experience with rail-bumping quarterback-turned-wideout Matt Jones shows, there just isn’t a great tradition of taking guys in the first round of the NFL draft to play out of position.
But don’t tell that to Grier, the scouting genius who brought such great players as Chris Canty, Damon Denson, Tony Simmons, Ed Ellis, and Sedrick Shaw to the Pats’ roster. In fact, by the time Belichick turned the team around and beat the Rams in the Super Bowl, Tebucky — by then sensibly converted back into a safety — was the last Grier player still making contributions to the team.
So we’ll always remember him fondly for that. We’ll remember less fondly, however, his post–Super Bowl demands for superstar money, the subsequent trade to the Saints, his ignominious return two years ago, and, now, his arrest. It seems that Tebucky approached a woman in the lobby at the Mohegan Sun casino this past week and began “inappropriately touching” her. The woman’s boyfriend, one Nikolaos Papathanasiou, came over and defended her; Jones punched him in the face. A third man then came over and punched Jones. All three men were eventually arrested. Jones was charged with breach of peace, third-degree assault, and fourth-degree sexual assault. He was released on $5000 bond.
Give Jones 50 points total for the inappropriate touching and the assault. Actually, make it 51 for all those times he bit on play-action over the years.
