Catching Hell

Regular readers know that I don't often muse on matters outside the dimensions of the football field. But sometimes these boundaries are challenged by certain individuals, by certain situations, lines blurred between the professional and the personal.

Deadspin and With Leather and their ilk expose the tabloid aspects of pro football, among other sports, with aplomb. Kissing Suzy Kolber ruthlessly tweaks the establishment and its self-importance. Pro Football Talk churns the league insider rumor mill at a breakneck pace. The Football Outsiders crunch the numbers with humor and insight.

I’d like to think here (and at spiritual sibling site Throwing Into Traffic) you glean another facet of the game. Call it aesthetics. Call it artistry. Call it the reason a football sticks to a last-string wide receiver’s helmet in the biggest game of his life and why we care.

I don’t care what you call it, all I know is that the explanations and analysis of sports writers and commentators often ring hollow when discussing this game that I love. Vapid quotes pulled from postgame pressers. Moralizing tirades. Lame stereotypes and self serving generalizations. It's kneejerk reactions in place of insight.

So I draw up boundaries to focus on what I am qualified to write about: the game as we witness it.

Unfortunately, the distinctions are not always clear. Take, for instance, Terrell Owens.

Owens, along with Randy Moss and Marvin Harrison, has long been the top receiver of his generation. It’s a fiery group that’s set to flame out over the coming seasons. Harrison is likely already reduced to ashes. Perhaps Moss torches defenders for a couple more seasons.

Owens smolders somewhere in-between.

His numbers are still great if not otherworldly any more. But it’s not his play on the field that defines Owens as a football player anymore.

No, it’s Terrell Owens as TO the primadonna. TO has questioned the leadership of his quarterbacks. He’s attempted suicide… or he hasn’t, depending on which report you believe. He’s insinuated homosexuality among his teammates. He’s demanded raises, threatened holdouts, arranged media circuses, criticized coaches, incurred fines, slept through team meetings, and ultimately divided locker rooms.

But on the field, Owens has played through pain, posted incredible numbers, run amazing routes, scored with machine-like efficiency, made lesser defenders look like fools, driven opposing defensive coordinators crazy, and been a central reason for the best seasons among three different teams and their respective quarterbacks in this league.

In the bluster since TO’s release from Dallas until his signing to Buffalo, we’ve been told that his greatest crime is fracturing a team’s psyche in pursuit of his own selfish ends.

A half truth at best. Owens’s greatest crime is something else… related but equally incriminating of competitive sports as a whole as it is of Owens.

Owens's crime is not that he's a jerk. Rather, it’s that Owens is an insanely gifted, incredibly hard working, compulsively productive jerk. And that, in the wake of tantrums and vicious insinuations, he may just be right more often than not.

Jerry Jones was lauded in many corners for finally ridding his Cowboys of the TO headache. An impressive assemblage of talent like the Dallas Cowboys had no business being held back by a primadonna wide receiver that questions the temerity of his team when the chips are down.

And if you believe the Cowboys are finally on the cusp of the Super Bowl, you haven't been watching the same Cowboys that, in concert, as a team, dropped three of their last four games this season and a clear shot at the playoffs.

The Dallas Cowboys are in their current predicament because they operate at all levels with desperation, without an identifiable plan. Owens was never the answer, but desperation opened up Jones's checkbook in 2006, $25 million wide.

Playing with an urgency and focused desperation on the field is one thing. Using it as a business and roster building model is something else entirely.

TO claims he was the fall guy for Dallas's shortcomings. Not a surprising claim, considering Owens's penchant for self aggrandizement, but in a sense not terribly far from the mark. First, Bill Parcells was forced out after directing the team's only marked improvement in the past decade. Then Wade Phillips assumed the playcalling duties from, before firing, defensive coordinator Brian Stewart.

Now Owens is run out of town.

Do you think Dan Reeves, hired in the offseason to troubleshoot Dallas's problems, quit before the end of his first day because Jones wouldn't fire Terrell Owens? No, Dallas's problems are manifold and deeply rooted.

And that's to say nothing of Tony Romo's horrendous play in games which have counted the most. At one point, Romo was poised to be the next Brett Favre, Favre of the MVP years. Best when the play breaks down, constantly creating something spontaneous and vital.

Now, Romo's poised to be Favre of the Jets, teetering on the edge of damaged goods. He did come to rely on Jason Witten too much late in the season, as TO charged, heaving the ball into the seam despite double coverage, often resulting in incompletes or, worse, interceptions (a pick-six against the Steelers in particular). In the Cowboys' three late season losses, Romo threw six interceptions versus three touchdowns, completing about 53% of his passes, all while losing three fumbles.

(It should be noted that those three losses were to three of the four teams making the conference championship games. Add in Dallas's loss to the Cardinals earlier in the season, and the Cowboys faltered against every team in or a game away from the Super Bowl. So much for preseason favorites.)

Owens wasted little time in gnashing his teeth over the Cowboys pathetic play late in the season. While breaking from the dull script nearly every player in the league reads from when frustrations run high, something was lost in Owens's bitching. He was telling the truth.

Rick Gosselin, the Dallas Morning News writer, might be right in saying Owens faces a sharp decline in his skills, now nearing 36, a tender age in receiver years.

Gosselin has forgotten more about the sport than I will possibly ever now, but I think he's wrong on this one, simply drawing obvious parallels to other great receivers reaching the same age while forgetting the particular receiver in question. TO now possesses a potent reason, in addition to his insane drive, to prove himself.

Hall-of-Fame linebacker Joe Schmidt once said you have to be a son-of-a-bitch to play this game. Owens's problem is that in a league of son-of-a-bitches he's the biggest and best one. He absolutely is a distraction. But the league doesn't lack for them. What of Ben Roethlisberger's motorcycle accident? Or his comments critical of former coaches, Bill Cowher and Ken Whisenhunt? Great teams don't avoid distractions... they overcome them.

We pin these failings on Owens and they stick because he plays the part so well... and because his words often approach truths that are more difficult to address or solve.

I haven't a clue if Owens will work out in Buffalo. He'll work hard. He'll demand the ball when things are tough. (And more often than not, he'll be right in demanding it.) My friend, the Counselor, has a fantastic quote of his father's concerning Dick Jauron, namely, that Jauron has "a bicep for a brain."

But Jauron's also an Ivy grad whose unyielding bicep-brained approach could play well with Owens and his distaste for the moral equivocations inherent in so much of the game. If nothing else, entertainment aside, Owens holds himself to a high standard and consequently everyone else around him.

For a team that's so often underachieved, Owens might deliver just the kind of harsh truth they need to hear.