Terrell Owens—Goodbye!

The inevitable happened again, as it always does with Terrell Owens.  The worst of football's bad boys wore out his welcome in Dallas, and the Cowboys cut him loose.  In Dallas as everywhere else, his conduct finally outweighed his talent.

It truly is a shame.  This is a man with tremendous speed and leaping ability. When his mind is on the game, he has great hands.  Unfortunately, his mind isn't always on the game, and when it turns to other things, bad things happen.

The problem includes his bad-mouthing of quarterbacks, coaches, and other receivers.  It becomes difficult for the necessary bond of teammates to form when one player insists on speaking ill of the others around him.  To be sure, TO's comments late last year on the Cowboys were nowhere near as bad as his vicious attacks on Jeff Garcia and Donovan McNabb on his previous teams. 

They were, however, bad enough.  A quarterback can't be thinking in a game situation whether another receiver will take offense.  TO complained that Tony Romo was preferring Jason Witten to him as a primary receiver.

There was another part of the TO problem.  Many writers seem to miss that TO regularly drops more passes than any other receiver in the league.  When TO is disgruntled, his concentration is off, and he drops balls.  No team can have its' No. 1 receiver doing that.

We have all seen through the years how former bad boys Bryan Cox, Corey Dillon, and Randy Moss became good teammates with the New England Patriots.  One wonders how much of that is Bill Belichick, and since 2003, the combined force of Tom Brady, Mike Vrabel, Rodney Harrison, and Tedy Bruschi. They are no-nonsense leaders who make sure that every new arrival knows that funny business is not how things are done in the northeastern blue and silver.  Vrabel is gone, but the culture remains.

Unfortunately for the southwestern blue and silver, there doesn't seem to be anyone in Dallas capable of calling bad actors on the carpet and straightening them out.  Ever since Jimmy Johnson left town, it has been one bad apple after another misbehaving. No one seems able to communicate that the Dallas Cowboys are supposed to be a team.

Certainly, that message never got to TO.  Maybe it never will.