"Channing Crowder is a man who likes to play with danger, but he may have put himself out on the thinnest limb there is.

The apparently former Miami Dolphins linebacker, who was released on the first day of Fishie camp, announced his retirement from smashing his body into others for money Tuesday, giving as his reasons financial security and a desire to be with his family.

This is known as playing the ace. This is also known as juggling damp dynamite.

"I woke up, saw my pregnant wife, and all the teams talking to me are way up north, and I said, 'I don't want to do it,'" Crowder said on the Sid Rosenberg Show, a local jock chat gig. "I looked at my wife and said, 'Nah, I'm going to be a family man now.'"

But unwilling to leave fate-tempting at that, he followed with this:

"I've got plenty of money saved," he said. "It's just not worth it."

Sounds like a man who is done with football, and for the sake of his cerebral cortex, we hope he is right.

But here's the problem. What if he discovers that he actually does like football more than he realized? What if he didn't have enough socked away? How does he unretire after this?

"Honey, I've thought about this, and I've concluded that me running into other people for cash is actually more along the lines of what I see for myself than the family."

That's not a conversation that ends well, ever. That's a conversation that actually ends as often as not with an iron skillet as a hat.

Now we don't pretend to know what Crowder's relationship with his wife is; we have no reason to think that it isn't utterly healthy and normal and even kind of admirable. Not many men would even entertain such a notion at such a formative age. "