Because of a messed up passport, rookie free agent running back Matt Brown finds himself back with the Bucs.

As longtime readers of Joe know, Joe is about topics, not transactions.

Every once in a while, a reader here will leave a comment, “Where is the story about [scrub the Bucs just signed]?” To which Joe usually responds, “What story?”

This is also why you will not read stories about a draft pick signing. Why? It’s not news. In the current CBA, salaries for rookies are structured. If a draft pick is silly enough not to sign, well, that’s news.

And only if there is a local guy signed by the Bucs after Memorial Day as a rookie free agent will you see that here. Maybe. At best, a rookie free agent signed this late may be a practice squad guy. There is a reason a rookie is still walking the streets looking for work in the final days of May, well after the draft and well after the rookie free agent pool has been picked over by 32 NFL teams.

But this signing by the Bucs of rookie running back Matt Brown is interesting to Joe because if not for a screw-up, Brown would be playing in the CFL, so reports hardcore NFL analyst Doug Farrar of Yahoo! Sports.

Sometimes, when you don’t get the things you want, something better comes along. That’s what former Temple running back Matt Brown found out when he recently prepared to travel to Saskatchewan and sign with the Roughriders of the Canadian Football League. Brown, the 2012 Big East special teams player of the year, was most likely undrafted because of his size — it’s hard to know what to do with a 5-foot-5, 169-pound running back in the NFL — but the CFL came calling. Problem was, Brown couldn’t make his flight from Baltimore because his passport had expired.

Brown then went about the process of updating his passport in Philadelphia, but that’s when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers called his agent, and asked him to come down to sign a contract. That’s what he did on Wednesday, and now, the return specialist is in the NFL.

Now if the name Matt Brown rings a bell, Joe wrote about him yesterday, and the Bucs gave him a tryout during rookie minicamp and he didn’t cut the mustard at the time.

While Joe wishes all rookies well in their pursuit of their NFL dreams, the odds of a guy who is only in the NFL because he had a screwed up passport and didn’t want to run afoul of ICE (the way the Department of Justice and the IRS are targeting innocent Americans, would you?) are, well, long.