I keep losing things more and more as the years go by -- my balance, my patience, my mind -- but I haven't lost my sense of wonder. For instance, I wonder where my mind went.
I definitely have a sense of wonder about the World Wide Web. It seems like black magic, with its pictures and sounds and stuff coming out of a tube. It's as if it was, well, television. You just click somewhere it tells you to click, and you're immediately taken somewhere else. Tell me that's not some test from a higher civilization form to see just how much humans will believe.
Anyway, Thursday night I stumbled upon the Denver Broncos-Houston Texans game at the NFL's Web site. They didn't show the whole game, just cut-ins from the NFL Network telecast, but enough of them to keep a decent flow of the game. I don't have satellite television, thus I don't have the NFL Network. So this was a nice surprise. Best of all, it was free. I don't expect to ever see that again.
Sage Rosenfels, who played the whole game for Houston at quarterback, was very good. He completed 16 of 27 passes for 200 yards and a touchdown, ran for a TD, and had a 28-yard pass to Andre Johnson off a terrific fake handoff on a stretch play. Rosenfels bootlegged left and threw a perfect spiral to Johnson at the Denver 1 to set up the Texans' final score.
Rosenfels is the best quarterback to ever come from Maquoketa, Iowa, and certainly one of the best quarterbacks to ever emerge from Iowa State. He may not have been Tom Brady-like, but he sure played like a veteran NFL quarterback. Which he is. He's been in the league since 2001. He's also been mired in the depth of depth charts nearly his entire career with Washington, Miami, and now Houston.
Houston is 7-7, but is 3-0 when Rosenfels has started in place of the injured Matt Schaub. The Texans thought they got their quarterback of the present and future when they traded with Atlanta to get Schaub last offseason. Maybe they did. Or maybe they got him the year before when they signed Rosenfels as a free agent, thinking he was just quarterback insurance for David Carr at the time.
"I don't know how you take him out,'' analyst Cris Collinsworth said late in Thursday's telecast. "He's 3-0 as a starter. The NFL is all about production, not who gets paid the most.''
Rosenfels' salary this year is $1.1 million. Schaub's is $8 million. Schaub got hurt in a game Oct. 20, and Houston rallied from a 28-3 deficit in the fourth quarter to take a short-lived 29-28 lead behind four Rosenfels TD passes - an NFL record for most touchdown tosses in the final quarter.
Flash back to March: "This is another exciting moment in the history of the
Texans," team owner Bob McNair said when he introduced Schaub at a team news conference. "Winning is all
about getting better every day, and that's what we're trying to
do."
They are getting better. That was a good-looking Houston team Thursday night. Real nice defense. A terrific receiver in Johnson. And a quarterback from Maquoketa and Iowa State.