The VY Guys Are Smiling Now

​Like a great many former Oilers fans with a concurrent Longhorn allegiance, I am no Houston Texans fan. I tried for a few years, right up until the 2006 draft. The selection of Mario Williams was it for me. I took a solemn vow then to never support the Texans until the McNair family relinquished ownership, and I have kept that vow. In fact, the Texans have been my anti-team these past three-and-a-half years. Every week my favorite NFL team is the one on the other side of the line of scrimmage from the Texans, and most weeks my Texans deliver, finding ever more exhilaratingly imaginative and resourceful ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

They are like Roger Staubach's Cowboys, only they lose instead of win.

Admittedly, it was harder to enjoy my Texans anti-fandom last year. With VY first sucking, then going on suicide watch, then pouting, then riding the pine for a whole season, and with Mario putting up Pro Bowl numbers, frankly, I just looked pretty stupid. Apparently, I was guilty of making one of those illogical emotional decisions men always say women are prone to. In sports dood talk, I was acting like a bitch.

But I didn't care. I did fret that VY might have to wait a few years and perhaps change the scenery around him. After all, porn-stachioed Jeff Fisher and his leather helmet game-plans were cramping Vince's style, I told detractors. You would suck too if stud-horse running back looked like an obese Willis from Diff'rent Strokes and ran a 5.35 forty and your receiving corps were a bunch of stone-handed clods who made Jabar Gaffney look like Art Monk. VY would one day be VY again.

And yet still I wondered, all through the Titans Kerry Collins-led 0-6 stumble from the gate. Finally Bud Adams came to the rescue by ordering Fisher to play Vince and the rest is history. Five straight wins, including yet another hometown humiliation of the team that passed him up for an increasingly injury-prone defensive end and a legend-enhancing length-of-the-field waning moments drive against the reigning NFC champs...He's back, Texans fans. Learn to deal with the consequences of one of the great Draft Day disasters in NFL history, because its true ramifications are only now starting to manifest. He will haunt this city worse than Steve Garvey, Stockton & Malone, and the entire Steel Curtain Defense ever did. Passing on him will rank alongside Lorenzo Charles's dunk against Phi Slamma Jama in the 1983 NCAA finals and the epic choke in Buffalo in the annals of Grand Bayou City Sporting Debacles.

And if you're in the mood for some real fun, read John Lopez's laughably premature take on how the Texans so-called braintrust made the right move here. It's fun reading Charley Casserly smugly defend what is proving to be a terrible, horrific decision...