Okay, everybody, say it with me ... "What the - ?''

It would be great if everything was cleared up by T.O.'s press conference about an hour ago - but it's only worse. It's clear now that the one set of people that is absolutely necessary to lend at least some clarity to all of this, is the paramedics, cops and whoever else interacted with him at his house and at the hospital last night. The stories T.O. and his publicist, Kim Etheridge, told a little while ago, and the ones in that police report, are so far apart, someone has to bridge that with the truth. That's not to say that only one of them is telling the truth, but at the very least, a serious misunderstanding has taken place, and it's not even clear who misunderstood whom.

T.O. did make a very good point: if he had, in fact, taken 35 pills at one time - and he said it was hydrocodone pills, which I've never had specific experience with, but I've taken Tylenol with codeine and it doesn't take much of that to make you pretty incoherent - he would not only not be giving a press conference this afternoon, he wouldn't even be out of the hospital. He might not even be with us right now. It's not like taking 35 Advils. That's worth pointing out to refute those who understandably are saying that today has been nothing but a long series of cover stories by T.O.'s people. Overdoses of any kind don't seem to be things that get cleared up that quickly, and the same would seem to go for anything that even hints at suicide.

Here's the wire story. ESPN.com also has video of the press conference with T.O. and Etheridge, as well as Bill Parcells, who once again wasted everybody's time in telling us what he didn't know. You have to wonder, though, how many coaches would go without having spoken to one of his best players in the first 18 hours after he was rushed to the hospital for a possible overdue/suicide attempt. Think Brian Billick would not have seen or spoken to Ray Lewis for 18 hours if that had happened here? Think he might have gotten to the hospital about 30 seconds after the ambulance did? That's all irrelevant, of course, in light of that fact that a player's life seemed to be in peril, but still.

UPDATE: Thanks to reader Jason for taking note of the typo in the above paragraph. I'd like to think that my writing "a possible overdue/suicide attempt'' was NOT a Freudian slip. That, of course, should read "possible overdose/suicide attempt.''