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A cleated foot gets caught in a bit of turf, a wet spot on the field causes a knee to twist in an unaccustomed angle, and many lives are affected. Some careers never will be the same. Coaches will lose their jobs, maybe even GMs. Gloomy, depressing thoughts, as I look back over my travels through the camps of the AFC East.

Miami was depressing even before David Boston went down. That's when I visited the Dolphins, before Boston wrecked his knee, and there was an air of sadness about their camp in Fort Lauderdale. The Ricky Williams story had just broken. The quarterback thing was going on-again. No one had yet been chosen, and neither Jay Fiedler nor A.J. Feeley enjoyed talking about it.

There were very few fans in the stands, and they were subdued. This was at the morning practice. Storm clouds were gathering and there was a chance the afternoon workout would be rained out. It turned out that it was.

Miami is the only AFC East team that will open its locker room to the press during the training camp, which makes all the difference if you want to get a cross section of opinion. I had watched Boston, lighter and energized, now that he was back with his old Arizona wideout coach, Jerry Sullivan, running deep patterns with a grace and speed I hadn't seen since his early years. I had never talked to him before, but in the locker room he was friendly, and positive and ready for big things. Obviously he was giving it a serious effort to project a new image.

The other wideout, Chris Chambers, had been the NFL's top long-ball man (18.4 yards per catch) two years ago. He had the bright-eyed, electric look you sometimes see in the very fast.

"David and me ... this is our chance to bust out ... to go deep ... just watch," he said. It seemed like a sensible writing angle. Williams gone, and with it the heavy thunder of the ground game, and through necessity ... whoosh, away we go. Unfortunately that is now kaput, and they're back to Derrius Thompson, who wowed 'em in camp as a possession receiver last year and then tanked, once the season started.

Next day the rains hit, the start of the hurricane season, beginning with the letter A. They squeezed a practice in, because two missed days in a row would not be kosher. A lake was forming in one end zone, forward passes were skidding and diving, the stands, naturally, were empty. If ever a place needed an indoor facility, it was this one.

After practice someone asked GM Rick Spielman if they were going to try to collect the $3 million-plus Williams might still owe the team.

"If we do," he said, "we'll spend it on an indoor bubble."

Two days later I was up in Foxboro covering the Patriots. The practice was crisp and clean with few mistakes, and when someone made one, the whole unit had to run a lap. The temporary bleachers were full. The night before, there had been a practice in the stadium that drew 18,000. On the second day I was there, three raindrops fell and the team went inside the bubble for its afternoon practice. (Miami had worked outdoors during the start of Hurricane Alex).

Outside I heard something that sounded like fan noise, which seemed odd, so I checked it out, and it came from the stadium. The Patriots' practice was being shown on the Jumbotron in front of, oh I'd guess 5,000 fans. The Pro Shop was up and running. Concession sales were brisk.

This is an odd role reversal. Miami used to be like this, and the Patriots were a kind of joke franchise. Now it's all turned around, which is what happens when you win two Super Bowls.

Freddy Smerlas, the old Bills nose tackle, does local radio and TV work, and I've always liked yacking with Freddy because you won't get two sentences in a row that are serious. The subject of Quincy Carter's allegedly failed drug test came up.

"I don't know what's so tough about the drug test," Freddy said. "The questions aren't hard, if you study. What do you take for a headache? What do you take for a stomach ache. When I played, I was dedicated. I stayed up all night studying for my urine test."

I was interested in the angle involving how the Patriot offense would evolve now that it included a keynote runner, Corey Dillon. Charlie Weis' attack is an ever-changing, complicated affair, keyed to the pass. Would he be willing to change gears and adapt a different philosophy?

The angle remained in my mental rooftops, because 1) Dillon, who was pleasant enough, had no idea what lay down the road, and 2) Charlie doesn't like me and probably wouldn't want to talk to me about it anyway, and 3) Bill Belichick doesn't let you talk to his assistants.

The Bills' camp in Pittsford, outside Rochester, was interesting. Unable to believe that Drew Bledsoe had crashed so heavily in 2003, after all the hoo-ha that surrounded his joyous arrival two years ago, the team seems to be going out of its way to give him all the weapons it can -- top draft wideout Lee Evans, last year's top draft, RB Willis McGahee, a new, offensive-minded head coach, Mike Mularkey, bringing in a new offensive brain trust, which includes 60-year old line coach Jim McNally (a few new offensive linemen might make sense, too, but you don't get everything all at once in these days of the cap).

The stands at practice, which a couple of years ago had been packed with giddy, delirious fans, were about half full -- maybe less. Good plays were greeted with polite applause and muted enthusiasm, rather than the cheers of old. Buffalo fans are football-savvy, and polite, for the most part. Also cautious. Burned once but not twice.

I was intrigued at the tone of the various interviews to which Travis Henry was subjected. The 5-9, 215-pound Henry is not a good back, he's a great one. Also heroic. Gained 1,356 yards, playing on a cracked ankle with torn rib cartilage.

"No back in the league gives me as much trouble," says the Dolphins' MLB Zach Thomas. "I'm short, and I can get leverage on the backs, but not Henry. I can't get under him. And he runs so hard. I hate trying to tackle him."

So Henry's reward is that every day he has to listen to the same set of questions two, three four times, that invariably begin, "So how do you feel about McGahee ...?" (fill in the blanks) or "You think they'll trade you after the season." And his jaw sets and he usually answers the same way.

"All I can say is that I'm very proud of what I've accomplished in Buffalo."

Finally I couldn't stand it anymore, and I got him alone, and in my most fatherly tone, told him, "Look, just keep answering these questions the way you have, and don't lose your temper, and then play out the rest of your contract here and sign somewhere else for three times what you're making. There are teams that would kill to get a back like you."

"That's what I plan to do," he said.

I'd never had a real talk with Mularkey, the new head coach, before. He'd been a back-up tight end most of his career, a meat-and-potatoes guy, but when he became the Steelers' offensive coordinator, the imps of zaniness suddenly burst loose, and wow, the stuff he pulled. That's what I wanted to talk to him about.

Goal-line play against the Vikings. Kordell Stewart walks away from the center and yells over to Hines Ward. Then the ball is directly snapped to Jerome Bettis on the weak side, and off he goes, through a confused defense. How? Why? Who?

"Actually, Dick Hoak, our running backs coach, thought it up," Mularkey said, "but it was me that called it in the game. When Kordell yelled, 'Hines!' that was the snap count. You always see it, when a quarterback walks away from center, usually the defense takes a knee. And the corners start adjusting their wrist bands. See, you get 'em to pause for a count, then you hit 'em in the teeth."

Sneak-attack football, unmanly, downright nasty.

"Aw c'mon." Mularkey said. "What's the defense always specialize in? Deception, right? So what's wrong if the offense does it, too? Hey, listen to this one. The very next week we ran the same play again, only this time we had a reverse off it. We figured they'd all be flying to Jerome. Guess what? The defense took a knee again ... and they got pounded again.

"We had three plays off of that thing, a trap, a sweep and a bootleg."

And Mularkey had an old Pop Warner double-wing that he put in after studying the playbook of a high school coach in Florida who ran it. And he says he has the first book ever written on the "true single-wing," and someday you just might see the Bills lining up in it ... "only if you have the right personnel for it on the field," he says.

"When we ran it in camp it was amazing, the confusion all the misdirection caused. You could have defensive guys flowing in different directions. They were running all over the place."

During a vacation in Alaska last summer, he talked to the winningest high school coach in the state, whose team ran out of multiple-wing formations. "He told me the biggest key was to tell a defense that had to face it -- 'Don't move.'"

He says he couldn't take it farther in Pittsburgh because he didn't have a real say in personnel, and to make it work you had to have the right kind of players. But in Buffalo? Who knows what could be on the horizon?

"I was watching our wideout, Bobby Shaw, throwing the ball in practice the other day, just goofing around," Mularkey says. "I asked him, 'You ever play quarterback?' He said, 'Why?' I told him, 'Just curious.' We drafted a wideout in the seventh round who's an ex-quarterback. Jonathan Smith. Who knows. Whether or not he makes the team may depend on how well he throws the ball."

Finally, the Jets. The first thing that struck me as I watched their practice was the youth. Not too many positions had been overhauled but I got a real youthful feel from this team. Especially on defense. Especially from their new coordinator, Donnie Henderson. Had a brief talk with him. Got ready for the worst, the usual cliches about being more aggressive, being more of an attacking defense, and all that blah blah. (Does anyone ever say we have to be less aggressive? Or more mental instead of more physical? Does any offensive coach say, instead of, "We're gonna mix it up and spread the ball around," ... we're gonna spread it less and limit it to our good players?)

No, the talk we had was not on the cliché level, and watching Henderson, who was the secondary coach for the Super Bowl Ravens, at practice and seeing the way his players, especially the young ones, respond to him, I get the feeling that the Jet defense this year will be young and fast -- prone to mistakes at times, but a good complement to a veteran offense.

One curious thing. Head coach Herman Edwards begins his midday press conference by reading from a list handed to him, no doubt, by the trainer. "Matt Dominguez ... shoulder. Wayne Chrebet ...quad." Like that. Boy, did this bring back memories. It was exactly the way Weeb Ewbank used to begin his press conferences, during my 10 years as a beat man, covering the Jets, reading the list handed to him by Jeff Snedeker, the trainer.

One day we managed to swipe Snedeker's list and substitute our own, so Weeb stood up in front of the room, adjusted his glasses, and read, "John Ebersole ... pulled eye. Mark Lomas ... worms." Then he looked up in fury.

"Worms! What the hell is going on?"

Happy memories.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Paul Zimmerman covers the NFL for the magazine and SI.com. His Power Rankings, "Inside Football" column and Mailbag appear weekly on SI.com.