Aw, chute!

My favorite sportswriter, Tyler Sullivan, posting on my favorite sports page, 247Sports.com:

“The Patriots struggles in that department were on full display right out of the shoot in their blowout loss to the Titans.”

First of all, there’s the minor matter of the missing apostrophe, right there at the end of Patriots. Since the struggles belong to the Patriots, you need to make Patriots possessive by adding an apostrophe at the end: The Patriots’ struggles….

But then there’s the larger matter of that “shoot.” The team’s struggles were on full display right out of the chute, not the shoot.

I’m trying to think of a situation where “right out of the shoot” might work.

I guess if you’re making a movie, and your lead actor gets annoyed, he could stalk right out of the shoot. If it’s the first day of filming, you could say he stalked out of the shoot right out of the chute! (And then roll your eyes and mutter, “Actors!”)

Or if you’re cooking an Asian dish, you might squeeze something out of a bamboo shoot. Although what good this will do for the flavor, I can’t imagine. And doing anything one bamboo shoot at a time seems awfully time-consuming. Whatever you’re squeezing out of the bamboo, I think you want to be squeezing it out of the shoots, not the shoot.

But otherwise, no. It’s a chute. Shoot, Tyler, I’m sorry.