Jeff Fisher Has A Massive Fish Story

The NFL offseason is mostly a collection of personnel move stories and the occasional human interest story interspersed with legal sagas and players sniping about team chemistry and new coaches. (This year's designated sniper: NFL MVP and Super Bowl winner Peyton Manning, everyone!)



Very occasionally, though, you get a rare treat. Sometimes it's Jeremy Shockey passing out after what you have to assume was a Viking-style weekend in Las Vegas, and sometimes it's Jeff Fisher talking about the time he was almost speared by a marlin that weighed almost as much as Casey Hampton.

Fisher and his sons were cruising for marlin off the coast of Guatemala last week when Brandon Fisher hooked a 650 pounder. The line pulled tight, Fisher the Younger held on, and then the Titans coach watched the whole thing through his camera.

“I was videotaping the whole thing,” Fisher recalled Thursday afternoon, “and all of a sudden this sucker is up out of the water, tail-walking and coming right at us. It jumped and hit the side of the boat, and then it made two more jumps toward us before diving straight down. Two more feet and that thing would’ve jumped into the boat and killed everybody. ”

First, incidents of marlins harming anyone are extremely rare, and even if it did spear one person, the odds of a marlin lining up all three Fishers and their guide like human shishkebab are so fantastically small as to require heroic incompetence by all parties to make it happen. Only if the marlin were a trained Shaolin swordsman would this be possible, and fish do not have hands. (I think. Right? Because if they do we are in TROUBLE.)

Second, the more likely danger from a marlin is getting dragged for 3 kilometers while spearfishing, and that's not what was happening here. (Even then, the guy landed the fish.)

Third, I thought that after working with him for years, Fisher would know what real live danger is through former Titan and new Redskin Albert Haynesworth. Pull a marlin out of the water, and you might get cut. Hook a rampaging 300-pound lineman, and there's no telling what kind of damage he could do once he gets to stomping. (He might have to put the camera down for something like that.)

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.