If the tension of the season is coming to a head for the team, I certainly couldn't tell by watching practice. It looked ... well, it looked like all the other practices, only wetter and colder. The mood seemed good. Everyone seemed to be working hard, jawing at each other, and beating themselves up when they messed up. I didn't see anything that indicated that the makeshift offensive line would be stellar, nor did I see anything that leads me to expect epic failure.

Head coach Jim Zorn summed it up, pretty much. "They are filling the spot," he said. "Chris Samuels has been to the Pro Bowl many times and it's hard to fill his spot but they are going to give great effort and the other guys are in a couple different places. The thing we've got to do is be assignment smart and then when we get out there, battle. I don't think everything is going to be perfect but it is going to be exciting and we're going to do well enough to win this football game."

That "it's going to be exciting" has a sort of "may you live in interesting times" ring to it, but on the whole I like Zorn's bravado here.

Actually, Zorn inadvertently summed the whole practice up with his his answer to a question about practicing in the rain. "We went down for footballs and we slid in the slop," he said. "We did what we needed to do."