Tatum Bell Lost the Last Leg He Had to Stand

Throughout this whole Tatum Bell/Rudi Johnson saga (creatively called "Bellhop"; I would have gone with "Bellhopgate" myself), I wondered one thing: where is Victor DeGrate in all of this?

DeGrate is, if you're unaware, the guy Bell name-dropped when feeding everyone his tale of misunderstanding and wrongly-identified luggage. Bell claimed he thought the bags he picked up were DeGrate's, as DeGrate had recently been cut by the Lions and asked Bell, a longtime friend, to deliver his things to him. So, I thought, wouldn't the whole situation be solved (as if it needed to be) with some sort of word from DeGrate?

"I just know I had nothing to do with it. What he did is his business. Why he said what he said, I don't know. I can't do nothing for you or for him as far as that goes. ... The way I just figure, he got caught up in a jam and that was the best thing going at the time, was to say what he said. ... sometimes it takes stuff like that to happen for you to find out how people are."

Well, then. That about settles it.

I think the only people who believed Bell to begin with were Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic who, on one of the eight days a year they actually appear on the radio show that bears their names, were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I don't think that's possible for even them anymore. And so Bell, who wants to clear his name in order to find an NFL job again, has probably fumbled away his last official NFL game ball.