If you spend too much time in the August heat of training camp, you may start to experience football-related hallucinations.
Bengals fans thought they saw Brett Favre in Cincinnati last week, presumably driving down Sycamore Street in a convertible with Elvis and Janis Joplin. The rumor caught fire on local talk radio, but when reporters asked Marvin Lewis if the Bengals had any interest in Favre, he made what Joe Reedy of Cincinnati.com called a bitter beer face. The Bengals quarterback situation has been the cause of much grimacing in southern Ohio; Andy Dalton’s debut (69 yards on 15 passes) caused an outbreak of lemon pucker, and the mere mention of Carson Palmer around Bengals camp has been known to cause anchovy sourpuss.
Palmer sightings have been rare, in Cincinnati or elsewhere. The disgruntled passer threatened to retire if the Bengals did not trade him. And while Palmer is not in camp, he has not filed his official retirement paperwork with the N.F.L., either. Maybe Favre was in town to offer retirement style points. Grimace.
Carolina Panthers running back Mike Goodson started seeing flickering images of Tiki Barber after Goodson fumbled twice in the preseason opener. Goodson studied tape of Barber after the game to correct his fumbling problem. Now we know what general managers of the 32 teams are doing with the unsolicited highlight reels Barber sent them. The Barber recording is actually haunted like the video in “The Ring,” and Goodson will begin fumbling uncontrollably seven days after watching it.
Daunte Culpepper made a flesh-and-blood appearance at 49ers camp for a tryout, but the team signed quarterback Josh McCown instead. Michael Erler, a reporter who covers the 49ers, said that San Francisco’s third-stringers, McLeod Bethel-Thompson and Jeremiah Masoli, were “discouraged” and their performance was “miserable” after McCown arrived. Imagine how Culpepper felt.
Some players hallucinate; others just get confused. The drudgery of camp appeared to be getting to Oakland Raiders quarterback Jason Campbell when he described the offensive coordinator Al Saunders’s lengthy playbook. “The first time I saw it was like looking at, what do they call it, the Webster’s Dictionary,” Campbell said. The worst thing about not knowing what a dictionary is called is not knowing where to look it up. “But now after you go through it and everything, it’s just paper.” Breaking news: the Raiders have finally thrown away the original vellum playbooks.
Not everyone in Oakland shares Campbell’s confusion about the playbook. Guard Bruce Campbell (no relation) said that the offensive line coach Bob Wylie makes his schemes easy to master. “He just tries to get it as easy as counting, 1-2-3, A-B-C,” he said. “A little kid could probably come out here and understand stuff we do.” No word yet on whether Raiders linemen will rename themselves the Jackson 5.
Some players lose the ability to differentiate friend from foe in the heat of training camp. Detroit Lions defensive end Kyle Vanden Bosch ripped the helmet off offensive tackle Corey Hilliard and punched him during practice Wednesday. It was the third skirmish of the day, and Coach Jim Schwartz made the whole team run wind sprints. “We had a little too much energy at practice and needed to expel it somehow,” Schwartz said. Schwartz also used the gassers to make sure the penalty-prone defender Ndamukong Suh, who just received a $20,000 fine for an overenthusiastic sack in the first preseason game, did not mistake “helmet-rip-and-uppercut” for a new pass-rushing technique.
Some players are moved to violence by the monotony of training camp; others get the sillies. The Jaguars and the Falcons scrimmaged each other last week, and Jacksonville Coach Jack Del Rio saw a difference in his team’s personality after the session. “There wasn’t a lot of silliness out here,” he said. Removing the piñata and withholding the party bags might have helped.
High altitudes can cause both giddiness and shortness of breath, as well as sudden bursts of honesty. Arizona Cardinals defensive tackle Dan Williams showed up for training camp out of shape, and with good reason. “I’ll be the first one to say, I didn’t work out like a John Lott workout,” Williams told The Arizona Republic. (Lott, the Cardinals’ conditioning coach, is the N.F.L.’s equivalent of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from “Full Metal Jacket.”) “Next year, I’ll know the proper steps and put this behind me.” Next year, there will not be a lockout, but no matter. Williams said that he was also affected by the 7,000-foot elevation of the Cardinals’ Flagstaff camp site; the altitude could also explain why the Cardinals seem a little loopy at the start of every season.
Bourbonnais, Ill., is just 660 feet above sea level, but perhaps the air at the Chicago Bears’ training camp is particularly thin. The newly acquired receiver Roy Williams (no relation to Dan) also acknowledged last week that he was not in peak condition. Williams said that his off-season conditioning did not get him into football shape; he espouses a workout regimen that couch potatoes could rally around. “When you get out here and play for four seconds and jog back into the huddle, that’s when you get in shape,” he said. Williams made news in Cowboys camp last year when the rookie Dez Bryant refused to carry his shoulder pads after practice; carrying pads must also lie outside the scope of his four-second conditioning program. Perhaps he should invest in a Segway.
Tom Brady may be yet another victim of mid-August heat mirages. One week after watching from the sideline as the New England Patriots’ backups stamped on the Jaguars, he took the field and led the Patriots’ starters to four touchdowns in a 31-14 win over the Buccaneers. “Glad we put some points on the board,” Brady said. “Obviously, there are a lot of things we can do better.” Obviously. The Patriots could score a touchdown before the coin toss, for instance.
The image on the horizon for many quarterback-starved teams is the silhouette of Terrelle Pryor, the former Ohio State quarterback who will enter the league via Monday’s supplemental draft. Pryor must serve a five-game suspension for N.C.A.A. violations before he can practice with his new team (the moral and legal implications of this policy are well, well beyond the scope of this article), and even the most optimistic scouts consider him a long-range prospect. Still, the usual suspects have queued: the Washington Redskins expressed mild interest; Cleveland Browns officials planned to attend Pryor’s Saturday workout; and the former Ohio State coach Jim Tressel was seen at Bengals camp by witnesses much more reliable than the ones who thought they saw Favre.
If the thought of the unprepared Pryor joining the disorganized Bengals upsets you, feel free to grimace.
