Colin Allred played in 32 games for the Tennessee Inbreds Titans from 2007 to 2010, recording 46 tackles, 0 sacks and 0 interceptions. Pro-football-reference.com gives him a career AV of 2.
His post-football career is more impressive. He got his JD at Berkeley then worked for Julian Castro at HUD. Now he represents Texas's 32nd district (Dallas and some suburbs) in the US House of Representatives. And he gives a great interview:
Now he's running to unseat Ted Cruz as the senator from Texas.
I’m running for U.S. Senate because Texans deserve a Senator whose team is Texas. Ted Cruz only cares about himself.
And he has a convincing pitch: Ted Cruz sucks. No one will arguewiththat.
Ted Cruz beat Beto O'Rourke by 215,000 votes despite the fact that Beto said he is in favor of taking guns from people which is the least Texan thing you can say. Seems to me that Allred only has to say "I played football at Baylor and in the NFL, and you can keep your guns" to pick up those necessary votes. What's more Texan than that?
I'll tell you what! During the January 6 riots, Allred texted his wife to tell her he loves her, then took off his jacket and tie and prepared to fight the mob with a stanchion. Ted Cruz retreated to a broom closet (and he wasn't pulling a Boris Becker, he was hiding). Eventually he came out of the closet and went to Cancun.
Derrick Henry led the league in yards, carries, and rushing TD for the second year in a row. Leroy Kelley did it from 1967-1968. It doesn't appear that anyone else did it since. A guy named Bill Paschal did it in 1943 and 1944; Steve Van Buren did it from 1947 to 1949; and Jim Brown did it in 1958-59. In fact, OJ Simpson is the only post-merger player I can find who led the league in all three categories twice in his career (1973 and 1975--it always comes back to OJ). For the record, Jim Brown did it four times because he's Jim Brown (1958, 1959, 1963 and 1965).
I've been a Derrick Henry fan ever since the 2014 Sugar Bowl. Something happened every time he touched the ball. I couldn't understand why he touched it only nine times. It was like watching a man among boys.
And that reception at the end was his only reception of the season! Incredibly, the guy making those plays was only 18 or 19 years old. Even more incredible: his senior year of high school highlight reel:
Also incredible: he looked like this when he was 14 years old. Here's a link to more footage--the "Derrick Henry Rule" in his middle school league starts around 1:50. According to that video, he never rushed for under 100 yards in any of his 45 career high school games. His senior year game log looks like something from Super Tecmo Bowl. Here are his high school stats:
So it isn't like he came out of nowhere. He was the best high school RB ever! I assumed that he would be the featured back in 2015 but instead he only got 172 carries. He made the most of them--990 yards and 11 TD. Bama was stacked that year with TJ Yeldon, Kenyon Drake, Amari Cooper and OJ Howard. There were too many mouths to feed so Henry didn't get a huge workload. I couldn't understand this, he was unstoppable yet he never got more than 20 carries in a game that year. Bama finish the year ranked sixth.
TJ Yeldon left for the NFL so Henry got all the carries in 2015, picking up 2219 yards (sixth best single-season total), 28 touchdowns (ninth best single-season total), a National Championship, the Doak Walker and Maxwell Awards, and the Heisman Trophy. He was a steamroller. He received high praise from brilliant pundits like me, opining "I said it before and I'll say it again. Just get be the ball to Derrick Henry." I think I was drunk when I wrote "get be the ball." I also posited "As I said here last year, just give the ball to Derrick Henry. He is not human." Mark concurred with "Stumping for Derrick Henry will never be a bad idea." TR, however, predicted that "Derrick Henry will not be an elite NFL running back. #hottake"
NFL front offices listened to TR instead of Mark and me. Henry was drafted #45 overall in 2016. This was the height of the "running backs grow on trees" phase of NFL team-building, but Melvin Gordon and TJ Yeldon went #15 and #36, respectively, the year before. People drafted ahead of Henry in 2016 include Paxton Lynch, Eli Apple, Corey Coleman, Josh Doctson, and Laquon Treadwell. My beloved Bills drafted Reggie Ragland at #41 and he never played a single down of football in a Buffalo uniform.
I knew the Titans had the steal of the draft. I took Henry in the seventh round of my fantasy football league--it's full of sharps, super competitive, and if you want a guy you have to move early. Mahomes went in the fifth round in 2018, for example. Sure, Tennessee had Demarco Murray, but he was 28 and coming off a shitty year in Philadelphia. Surely the superhuman rookie would get the bulk of the work.
I forgot that Mike Mularkey was involved in Tennessee. He's an idiot. He allocated almost three times as many carries to Murray as Henry in 2017, and an even split between the two in 2017.
Mike Vrabel took over in 2018 and made Henry the week 1 starter but he only averaged about 11 carries per game, then Vrabel demoted him for Dion Lewis in week 9. He finally gave the ball to Henry in week 13. Over the last four weeks of the 2018 season, Henry complied 585 yards and 7 TD on 87 carries, good for 6.72 yards per rush. He even threw a 6 yard completion. Then, of course, 2019 and 2020 were laser shows.
How the hell did this happen? Derrick Henry was literally the best high school running back in the history of high school running backs. Then he went to Alabama and put up eye-popping yards-per-carry numbers his first two years but couldn't get all the work because of TJ Yeldon? He had an all-time season his senior year as the featured back on the national championship team and won the Heisman, but didn't get drafted until the second round? And then his team needed over two and a half seasons to realize he was a cross between the Hulk and the Flash, while he languished behind a past-his-prime back averaging 3.6 yards per carry who got benched by his previous team for Ryan Mathews? How is this possible? How was he hiding in plain sight for years?
Mark and I had a text exchange about this. Most of the all-time great running backs were highly drafted and started right away. Curtis Martin's success was a bit of a surprise as a third rounder, but he started fifteen games as a rookie--it didn't take long for Parcells to figure out what he had. Terrell Davis was drafted in the sixth round, in large part due to his history of migraines, but he was able to overcome that with medication approved in 1997. Sumatriptan y'all! He started fourteen games as rookie because Shanahan knew what he had. I don't consider Frank Gore to be an all-time great but it only took him one season to become a starter.
The closest comparables are perhaps Ahman Green and Shaun Alexander who rode the bench behind Ricky Watters for two years and one year respectively. But Watters in Seattle was a hell of a lot better than Demarco Murray in Tennessee.
How do you not realize that you have a guy who can do this?
Bud Adams clearly read G:TB's Bills/Titans preview. Here's his response.
Note that Frank Wycheck, he who threw the infamous spot pass to Kevin Dyson, is emblazoned below Adams' luxury box. Is there not a more prominent Titan to post on such a prominently placed placard?
Hat tip to Geoff for bringing this to my attention.
I hate the Titans more than any NFL team. I hate their flaming logo. I hate Jeff Fisher’s hick mustache/mullet combo and the inordinate amount of respect he gets despite having a 0.544 career record. I hate watching the ugly brand of football they’ve played for the past dozen years. I hated JevonKearse in his first stint with the Titans. I hated all the undue media fellation bestowed unto Steve McNair with his 6.9 ypa and Eddie George with his 3.6 ypc. I hate Derrick Mason, the worst 10,000 yard receiver of all time.
But my hatred for the Titans was truly born on January 8, 1999, the day when that which the mainstream media and other peckerlessdouchewads refer to as the “Music City Miracle” occurred. I freely admit that this hatred is stupid. Completely irrational. It’s just a game. The Bills couldn’t have won it all. The Titans are a bland franchise without a storied history, completely unworthy of my disdain. But I can’t shake it. I hated Bud Adams’ postgame comment that he had never seen anything like the “Home Run Throwback” play before. (Which is total horseshit. Unit M’s A-side intramural team ran that play in 1996. The Redskins ran it with Desmond Howard and Darrell Green, too.) I hate watching replays of that spot pass. It’s like the Zapruder film, you can’t really tell what happened. It always, and rightfully, appears on “Top 10” lists. And I know I’ll have to watch it multiple times before this weekend’s Bills/Titans tilt.
The team that plays in Tennessee doesn’t deserve to be called the Titans. To make my case I need to enlist the aid of Thomas Bulfinch, a Harvard-educated accountant who lived in Boston in the nineteenth century. In his free time, he summarized classic stories “in simple, condensed form for young or busy readers.” Kind of like what we do here at G:TB. Bulfinch’s most famous work, “Bulfinch’s Mythology,” was given to me by my grandmother when I was about 8 years old. Today I turn to this tome to take Tennessee’s Titans to task.
The Titans were a race of gods who begat, and were eventually overthrown by, Zeus and the rest of the Olympian gods. Jupiter ate all of his children, except for Zeus, who later tricked Jupiter into vomiting them up. Ripshit from exposure to digestive juices, Jupiter’s children got medieval on his ass and imprisoned Jupiter and the rest of the Titans in Tartarus. Homer said Tartarus was as far beneath Hades as Hades is beneath the earth. And from what Bulfinch has to say, being in Tartarus sucks. Thus being a Titan sucks.
The Houston Oilers were an original AFL franchise that was eventually overthrown and subsumed by the NFL. Then they were relocated to Tennessee, which sounds a lot like being banished to Tartarus to me, and renamed the Titans. But is this franchise sufficiently miserable to warrant the Titans moniker? I think not. The Titans have not experienced nearly enough suffering to qualify for Titan status. They should be stripped of the name and henceforth called something more fitting, like the Yokels, Bumpkins, Hillbillies or Inbreds.
But who has the right to bear the Titan burden?
There were a bunch of Titans, according to Bulfinch. The most famous one is probably Prometheus. He and his brother Epimetheus (but not his buddy Epididymis) were tasked with making man and animals, and providing them with various faculties like claws, strength, wings, and so on. Epi screwed up and gave all the faculties out to the animals without saving any for man. So Prometheus gave man fire. Apparently he wasn’t supposed to, and, as you probably know, he was punished by being chained to a rock where a bird would peck out his liver every day, and it would grow back every night only to have the whole bird pecking thing happen again. What you probably don’t know is that Prometheus knew some secret that would have gotten him off the rock, but he refused to drop a dime on his boy Jove (the stop snitchin’ movement started early) and he remains on the rock to this day. According to Bulfinch, “He has therefore become the symbol of magnanimous endurance of unmerited suffering, and strength of will resisting oppression.”
Sounds like the Bills to me.
Prometheus gave us more than fire. Pandora, the world’s first woman, was created to tell you about new music you like . . . er, rather to punish Prometheus and mankind for the fire incident. So without Prometheus we would be sitting around in the dark and not getting laid. Kind of like the Wheelhouse staff.
Pandora had a box (yeah she did!) that she wasn’t supposed to open. But she was a woman, and G:TB readers know that women never listen, so it’s no surprise that she opened it and all sorts of miserable shit poured out. Kind of like when Ralph Wilson opens his mouth at a press conference to announce a new coach. All that remained in Pandora’s box, much like a Bills fan’s heart, was hope.
But the Bills don’t deserve to be called Titans.
The Tennessee Titans are not the first Titans. There were the aforementioned Tartarus Titans, of course, but also the New York Titans, who later became the New York Je(s)ts. TR has previously summarized Jets misery in this space. The Titan name is more fitting for them than for Tennessee. Like the Titans of Greek lore, they briefly ruled the league (1969, clicks), and were then banished to the football version of Tartarus, losing games and sucking balls for eternity. Not only are they banished to a stretch of swamp off the Turnpike, said stretch is named for their cross-town rivals. And their fans are “the symbol of magnanimous endurance of unmerited suffering, and strength of will resisting oppression.” Tommy Bulfinch would approve.
The Bills are no Titans. Unlike the Jets, the Bills never ruled. They never had an ignominious fall from deity. They were never stripped of godhood. They were always merely mortal.
The Bills could be Tantalus – fulfillment is within sight, but perpetually out of reach. Rooting for the Bills is a lot like rooting for Sisyphus. You know they’re destined lose in the end and hoping for success is pure futility. Ixion was fucking bumming too. He was chained to a spinning, flaming wheel and had to constantly yell “You should show gratitude to your benefactor!” But these comparisons aren’t quite right.
The Bills are like Tityus. He was a giant, but not a Titan. He also tried to assault some goddess so he was given the same punishment as Prometheus. The thing with the birds eating his perpetually regenerating liver – that’s the analogy I’m making to the Bills, not the business with the assault. O.J. is a killer, not a rapist.
When the Bills move to Toronto in a few years, they have to drop the Bills mascot. It makes no sense outside of Buffalo. Hopefully they’ll read G:TB and rechristen the team the Tityuses, or even better, the Tityii. We shall see.
This is supposed to be a preview of a football game, not a classics lesson. So here’s some incisive analysis.
The Inbreds welcome the Tityii to Doublewide Stadium with open arms and a gap-toothed smile. They have the league’s #2 rushing offense. Inbred RB Chris Johnson leads the league with 959 rushing yards, averaging an insane 6.7 yards per carry. He’s apparently the fastest guy in the league. The Tityii run defense is as impotent as RaffiePalmeiro, giving up more total yards on the ground than any other team in the league. Opponents average 173.6 yards per game on the season, 209.8 yards per game in their past 6 outings. Their Barry Sandersesque 5.1 ypc against is the 14th worst ypc against in NFL history. Let me say that again. The 14th worst yards per carry against IN THE HISTORY OF THE EN EFF FUCKING ELL. They give it up like Ashley Dupre.
John Fox should have been fired on the spot the second he allowed Jake Delhomme to throw a single pass against the Tityii. Jeff Fisher may be an Inbred coach, but he won’t screw this up. The only way he can lose is if he puts Chris Johnson on the bench. Because every time Johnson touches the ball he’ll score. I guarantee Johnson has a historic performance on Sunday, barring injury. Three hundred yards is not out of the question. I’m not kidding. The Tityii gave up 210 yards to 31-year-old Thomas Jones. You don’t think Chris Johnson can top that? Hell (Tartarus?), Johnson could get 200 yards with Vince Young chipping in another 100 yards rushing … by the end of the 3rd quarter.
The Inbreds have the worst pass defense in the league, statistically, but I don’t buy it. They played the Steelers, Texans, Colts, and Pats. That skews their numbers a bit. Ryan Fitzpatrick will never be mistaken for Roethlisberger, Schaub, Peyton, or Brady. The Tityiicouldn’t score at will through the air against Mount Saint Mary’s girls quadriplegic team. And the Inbreds are fair to middling against the run. This will be ugly.
But my hatred for the Titans was truly born on January 8, 1999, the day when that which the mainstream media and other 
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