Yeah, I'm gonna go and spit.

I'm not sure what Matthew Yglesias is referring to here, but I suspect he might need to pay a bit more attention to the TV that's on Sunday afternoons, as opposed to Sunday mornings. Turn off the C-SPAN and watch some ESPN, Matt!

I assume that Brian Williams, when moderating the latest debate amongst the Democratic presidential candidates, referred to the eleven men on a football team, by which he undoubtedly meant the eleven players who are allowed on the field at any one time. This is why teams will get penalized if they happen to have twelve men on the field while a play is in progress, and why in a city where the fans are especially loud and rambunctious in the stands, the phrase "The Twelfth Man" is used to refer to them.

(By the way, anyone who pays attention to football sooner or later gets to see Steelers head coach Bill Cowher's head nearly explode as he takes exception to a referee's call. By far the best was some years back when his Steelers got flagged for twelve men on the field, when they really only had the specified, and legal, eleven. He got a photograph of the play in question at halftime - - football teams take huge numbers of photos of every play, for coaching analysis after the game - - and then he proceeded to track down the offending ref and stuff the photo down the guy's shirt. It was a classic moment. Cowher got fined pretty heavily, if memory serves. I think that game might have been against the Vikings.)

UPDATE: It turns out that Matthew probably knew what he was talking about, and Brian Williams muffed the analogy. In his opening remarks to the debate (official transcript here), Williams said: "We have an extraordinary field of Democratic candidates, extraordinary, for one, for its size. We are one short of an official NFL roster at 10." So, he was clearly trying to allude to eleven men on the field, but he mis-spoke and allude to the actual roster, which is actually 53 men, if memory serves. So I didn't catch Matthew in a funny error after all. Bummer.