The weekly audience for Eddie Lacy's locker-side chat engulfs the table where the 5-foot-11, 240-pound running back always sits. Like an inverted fishhook, an opening awaits. He enters the fray. The arc completes.
What follows is often an exercise in uncomfortable predictability, a star player for the Green Bay Packers inundated with difficult questions about his weight, his demotion, his worst season of football since falling in love with the sport as a 5- and 6-year-old in the playground leagues of Louisiana.
Frustrated, disappointed and, by his own admission earlier this month, partially stumped about the origin of his on-field struggles, Lacy turns to his favorite reply — "It's cool" — to address and deflect repeated inquiries about his mood or the injuries to his ankle and groin.