July 28, 2003
What A Long, Strange Off-Season
By Dave Sabo
HoustonProFootball.com
Was the off-season always this long?! After five long years of having no team to dissect through spring and early summer, this off-season has seemed interminable. Throw in the fact that the six months since the Super Bowl have been; personally, professionally and HPF.com-ally, the most tumultuous of my life and it’s been down-right torturous.
Thankfully, the long wait is over. “Veterans and rookies report.” Have four finer words been spoken within the realm of sport? I think not.
Regulars in this little corner of HPF.com (both of you) have probably noticed that it’s been mighty slow around the Armchair since late January. Not that I haven’t noticed the goings-on around the NFL, especially as pertains to the usual suspects. But, more on them in a minute.
Until the past few weeks, it had been a fairly quiet around Reliant Park. With nothing major going down on the free agent front, the biggest news this spring was the Texans snarky college draft and their selections of Ragone, Wand and Henson. Then came the supplemental draft and their selection of Georgia Tech running back Tony Hollings and, most recently, the sudden but, not entirely unexpected retirement of Tony Boselli.
In regards to the draft, the most indelible impression I’m left with is that C.C. and Co. didn’t think too highly of this year’s offerings. As with so many moves by this front office, the three aforementioned selections were made for the future. Ragone will carry a clipboard and function as “Carr insurance” until such time as he’s offered as trade bait. Wand is a long-term project and Henson was wishful thinking. A source claims his people were talking to a number of teams about drafting him and the Texans, apparently, have thrown a monkey wrench in those plans. Now, it comes down to whether he can suck enough as a third baseman to get Big Stein to cut his losses. I’m not holding my breath.
Hollings makes moot the question “Will the Texans go after a stud RB in 2004”? Taken in the supplemental draft with what was, technically, a 2003 third-round pick, Tony is expected to be the future of the Texans running game. I’d feel a lot better about this move if he had more than four games under his belt as a collegian and weren’t coming off a knee injury, but, once again, this is about the future and he’s got a ton of upside.
Boselli. Ah, Tony we hardly knew ye. I’ll admit that I was one of the one’s that held out hope that he’d be able to return to at least some level of productiveness. I won’t fault the Texans for rolling the dice on a five-time Pro-Bowler who, when healthy, was regarded as the best in the League at his position (especially when the consolation prize is Pro-Bowler, Gary Walker). I do have some problems with the way the news of his recovery was handled. The reports from off-season workouts differed greatly from the reports of those same workouts at the time of his retirement announcement. I realize and accept that the organization will try and put the best face on a situation, but that kind of spin is unacceptable. We, as fans, are capable of handling and deserve to hear, the truth. And we’ll even accept a little varnish.
All in all, though, with the recent spate of rookie signings, there’s a lot to look forward to as camp opens. Especially since we’re not fans of a team run by (as I like to call them) Dumb, Dumber and Al Davis.
Let’s begin with Ol’ Yella Teeth up in dallas. A season after his pathetic squad is whored out on national television by an expansion team in it’s first ever game, goes 5 and 11 for the third straight season and continues its long and storied tradition of employing criminals; this genius goes to the local muckety-mucks and asks them to pitch in for his billion dollar stadium, mall and amusement park. It’s “JerrahWorld”! And, according to his plan, that stadium will hold 100,000 fans. As it stands, there are entire sections of seats still available for games this year, but he believes 40,000 people will pay $20 a head to stand in plazas above both endzones. Even I don’t think Cryboy fans are that stupid. Good luck getting that plan to fly in this economy.
Did you watch the Texans game in Washington last season? Did you notice that bright yellow ring of empty seats at FedEx Field? Well, Li’l Danny Snyder noticed. He’s noticed it every year since 1999 when he bought the team and he’s been trying desperately to do something about it. Last year it was buy four club seats (at $2,100 a pop) and get two free Super Bowl tickets. This year it’s buy four and get a free membership into the Redskins Tailgate Club. That’s A free membership, meaning that, if your three buddies that sit in the other three seats want to join you at Tailgate Club functions (essentially all-you-can-eat pre-game barbecues), they gotta shuck out $450 for the season. While $45 seems kinda steep for a free feed, it’s not unheard of. The Texans have just such a deal going as do Kansas City and Tampa and probably other cities as well. The difference is that in Washington, that $45 doesn’t include beverages other than cokes. You wanna wash down your burgers and dogs with a beer and it’s gonna cost you. And it’s gonna cost you stadium prices.
Oh, there’s one other difference between Li’l Danny’s party and others around the league. There’s a $499 “initiation fee”. That’s right, on the heels of such innovations as admission fees for training camp and $3,000 obstructed-view field-level (literally) “Dream Seats”, Li’l Danny now brings you the tailgate party PSL! Fortunately, unlike his PSL’s for seats this is a one-time only deal. Seat PSL’s in Washington are only for ten years at the end of which holders must ante up again. A co-worker recently told me he received a flyer informing PSL holders that PSL prices would be increasing at the end of their current ten year agreements; by 120%. That’s one-two-zero PERCENT! But, he was offering holders the chance to renew now with only a 75% increase. What a prince!
Finally and almost sadly, is the story of Al Davis. In case you’ve missed it, Davis is currently involved in a court case in which he is suing the NFL, the Network Atrocious Mausoleum Commission, the City of Oakland, the group tasked with selling season tickets in Oakland in 1995, the City of Los Angeles, the Rose Bowl, every team that’s ever beaten him and according to the subpoena I received, me; for $1.1 billion. Actually, he’s only suing the first four on that list for, he claims, lying to him about season ticket sales for the Raiders considerably-less-than-triumphant return season to the Bay Area. Forgetting for a moment that he abandoned Oakland a decade earlier and is still trying to claim Los Angeles as “his” territory, the rest of this story is utterly laughable. First of all, he freely admits that he had no written guarantee of a sold-out stadium. Second, he’s already sued (and lost to) the NFL, accusing the League of “forcing” him out of Los Angeles (and an NFL-funded stadium). And, most laughably, he’s insisting that he was never told about the ticket shortfall despite the defense presenting internal memos on Raider stationary, news-clippings from the Raiders own clip files and video-taped testimony from the previous court case which contradict, completely, his current claims. Apparently, every warm-blooded mammal in Northern California knew ticket sales were slow except Davis. He’s been reduced to claiming that all the proof against his claims is nothing but the NFL picking on a poor, defenseless old man. I am, literally, laughing out loud right now. Al, baby! Are you KIDDIN’ me?! YOU are suing THEM! Those BASTARDS! I’ll tell ya, watching Al Davis’ slow decline into irrelevance has been supremely satisfying.
So, there ya go, the 2003 NFL off-season. It’s been too long and it’s time to get back to work. I’ll see everybody in the Blue Lot on September 21.
Dave Sabo heads into camp this year in the best shape of his NFL-watching career. He hit the couch hard and often powering through an entire season of “Real World: Las Vegas” and adding repeated viewings of “Most Extreme Elimination Challenge” to his off-season program. He is supremely confident that his switch from a potato to a corn based snack chip will help avoid that late-season drop-off in production that plagued him last season. 
Al Davis 
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