The idea behind the "All-Name" team is that over the Honestly, we asked ourself, could Bronko Nagurski, Dick Butkus, Larry Csonka, Tedy Bruschi, Bart Starr, Joe Montana, Lynn Swann So, in the preseason draft for our little, 10-team league, Unfortunately, by draft time, at 8:00 on a late summer For example, our quarterback was Daunte Culpepper, and But the players we really lusted after, lexically speaking, 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 … Continue reading ![](\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/blogs\/static\/dowbrigade\/margram.jpg\")
The
\n always interesting New England Patriots have presented the Dowbrigade
\n with a difficult dilemma. We had almost resigned
\n ourself to the rude realization that our attempt to compete in the ESPN
\n Fantasy Football League with an "All-Name" team was a misconceived and
\n doomed experiment from the start, and well-consigned to the dustbin of
\n brilliant ideas, idiotically implemented. And then, the Patriots had
\n to go and convince Martin
\n Gramatica to come out of retirement<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\n years, we have become regularly convinced (usually around the time of
\n the NFL college draft), that we can predict which kids are going to have
\n long and productive pro careers JUDGING BY THEIR NAMES ALONE! Some players,
\n we had noticed, just had football names, names we could see, in our mind’s
\n eye, emblazoned in headlines on the sports page, or scrolling, ticker-style,
\n across the bottoms of CRT and plasma screens across America.<\/p>\n
\n or Jack Youngblood (all Hall-of-Famers) have done anything OTHER than
\n play professional football.<\/p>\n
\n our team, the H20town
\n Ids<\/a>, would draft only players with solid, hard-hitting
\n football names, and easily win the division. That was the plan, anyway.<\/p>\n
\n Saturday night, we were already deeply under the influence of a combination
\n of doctor-prescribed
\n and herbal remedies for the grab-bag of aches and afflictions from which
\n we occasionally suffer, and as a result our picks were more capricious
\n than coldly lexical. That is, instead of picking the players with the
\n best "football" names, we were picking the ones with the weirdest, funniest,
\n oddest or most difficult to pronounce names.<\/p>\n
\n right away we were in trouble. We breathed a sigh of relief when he was
\n finally knocked out of action in mid-season and we were free to choose
\n a replacement from among the dregs that none of the nine other owners
\n thought
\n worthy
\n to carry on their rosters. Our other selections included: T.J. Houshmandzadeh,
\n Antwaan Randle El, Muhsin Muhammad, Mewelde Moore, Keyshawn Johnson and
\n Jay Feely. (roster
\n here<\/a>)<\/p>\n
\n were the Gramatica brothers, Mart<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"