Did Joe Thomas Almost Accidentally Kill Fellow Hall of Famer Jared Allen???

The debut episode of Joe Thomas's new Hall of Fame Farms YouTube series nearly opened with an insurance claim on a fellow Hall of Famer.

The premise of the Hall of Fame Experience is that Thomas invites notable guests to his Wisconsin farm, where he raises Wagyu and Angus. The inaugural guest was Jared Allen, who grew up on a cutting-horse ranch and is launching Full Ride Bourbon in a collaboration with Hall of Fame Farms. Allen was supposed to bring his horses but came straight from his daughter's volleyball tournament with no time to hitch them up, so he showed up with just a rope. With calves to tag, Thomas proposed roping them off the back of an ATV, and Allen figured the only way to find out if it worked was to try.

It did not go smoothly. Allen, impressively, lassoed a back leg of the first calf they drove up on, no easy feat on a bouncing ATV ride with bad thumbs working the throttle to match the calf's speed alongside its mother. But when he pulled to tighten the rope, the athletic Wagyu calf leapt clean through the lasso, and Allen flipped, as Thomas put it, ass over teakettle. Thomas felt the ATV get lighter behind him, turned around, and saw Allen flat on his back, his first thought being that he'd just injured a Hall of Famer on the very first episode of a show meant to celebrate the farm experience. Thankfully, the man of steel popped right up and they kept filming.

Thomas also marveled that Allen arrived with a branded case full of different lassos, explaining their varying weights and stiffness the way Thomas, a former shot-putter, once fussed over his implements, or the way Wisconsin's fancy paid bowlers carry their cases. Thomas's response was simply that as long as Allen had a rope, that was all they needed, because Thomas had no real chance of roping anything himself.