/Vault door shudders and creaks, whines and slowly withdraws, rolling to one side

//A dirty, disheveled man in a torn jumpsuit peers out from the door frame, squinting against even the faint sunlight. His beard appears to be thick and bushy enough to hide Dan Snyder, but something still hints at the rugged good looks and chiselled features of a Hollywood heartthrob underneath.

Is…is it over? So. Much. Blood. Jeebus, Allah and Vishnu, the horror…limbs all over the place, like an all-amputee orgy…

How can it not be over, when there’s no one left to injure or be injured? For God’s sake, Rambo didn’t have a body count as high as this preseason. I tried to write this week’s column as a M*A*S*H parody, but good God, it turned from a Early Season Funny Episode to a Late Season Episode Written By Alan Alda really quick. Schadenfreude only goes so far before it turns into a macabre fascination and then genuine pity.

Unless it’s the Patriots. I could survive for a goddamned year on nothing but sweet, sweet Masshole tears.

But seriously- the Tony Romo injury was funny initially because it was soooooo predictable, but it happened at an unpredictable time. For both of the F1 fans in the audience, it’s like having Pastor Maldonado crash out of a race, but doing so driving the car out of pit lane for warmups. Also, it was a lovely fulfillment of the “unless Romo gets injured again” caveat that essentially every Cowboys Season Preview included. If Dez or Elliot gets broke, I may have to dust off an old favorite of mine.

But then we got Tedrick Bridgewater damn near losing his leg dropping back to pass in a non-contact drill in the last practice of the preseason. By all accounts, he’s a really nice kid and I was looking forward to him being able to air it out a little more now that they’re playing home games inside the world’s shiniest sandcrawler.

To whichever god was trying to do some righteous smiting: Adrian Peterson was right. fucking. there. Did you miss? Overthrow your intended target? Just our luck, we’ve finally got an old-school interventionist deity and he’s got the accuracy of Tim Tebow on an ether binge.

As far as I can make out, nearly every team has put someone on Injured Reserve already, and most of them were either a projected or possible starter. Except for the Greatriots, as the Dark Lord’s contract with the Ichor God Bel-Shamharoth appears to have been renewed. The closest they got was putting their third-string running back on the PUP list, and Tom Terrific getting an ouchie because he tried to use something as plebian as scissors.

Foxboro delenda est and all that.

The rest of my usual CrimeBeat!-type shit is actually fairly positive, so there are no ACCUSED to BRING FORTH this week.

Joey Bosa and the Chargers somehow both managed to lose their pointless staring contest, the result being that the Chargers allegedly ‘fully guaranteed’ the contract and got a rusty defender who’s never seen an NFL offense and last saw any sort of field in anything other than spandex was before the term “Zika” had entered common parlance and everyone assumed there was no way Donald Trump would actually be the Republican candidate for president. Bosa, on the other hand, allegedly gave on “cash flow issues” in years 2-4 of the contract, and agreed to cut the Rosato brothers in on the numbers racket in La Jolla.

In final positive news, former referee and inexplicably-nutless blind squirrel Mike Carey was allegedly shit-canned by SheeeeBeeeeEsh for…well…presumably for being wrong all the damn time, although that hasn’t gotten Pheeeel Seeeems fired, so maybe it was just racial. Both CBS and Carey’s agent have denied that the firing was in any way linked to Carey’s widely-rumored addiction to Brain and Nerve Tonic.

Either way, we’re losing a great NotKharacter  at least in the short term, so please pour one out in tribute. Don’t worry- it’ll be ruled a completed catch.