Coffman’s Corner

By Clayton Coffman | ccoffman@flagler.edu

Jerry Jones does have some brains after all. The locker room cancer that was Terrell Owens had to go. If Vito Corleone had been around, T.O. could have expected a visit from Luca Brasi to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Over the last three years, Team Obliterator, as some have called him, continued to showcase his skills as the worst teammate in the history of sports. He was the leader of the Cowboys’ locker room and it ruined this team.

Not only did the Cowboys not win playoff games, they conflicted with each other in the shadows. Remember T.O. complaining about Jason Witten supposedly getting all the passes thrown his way? Remember Jerry Jones pushing back a Cowboys team party for T.O.’s birthday party?

Yep, if the spotlight isn’t on Owens all the time, all hell will break loose. Those were just a couple of the incidents that T.O. put the Cowboys organization through. Owens’ drive to receive all the attention hindered everything the Cowboys tried to do. And, finally, Dallas decided to put an end to it.

Jerry Jones has a lot of people to thank for helping him come to this decision. His son Stephen, who flew with his father to Florida to break the news to Owens and his agent, Drew Rosenhaus, was really in his father’s ear about Owens. By all reports, the meeting went well and didn’t move the two parties apart except contractually. But come on.

There has to be a Vegas oddsmaker out there making a line on how long it takes before Owens erupts again. And we know he will. It happened when T.O. was signed by Philadelphia and he inferred that his former teammate, 49ers quarterback Jeff Garcia, was gay. “If it looks like a rat and smells like a rat, by golly, it is a rat.”

It happened in Philadelphia when he called out quarterback Donovan McNabb following the Eagles Super Bowl loss to the New England Patriots. “I wasn’t the guy who got tired in the Super Bowl,” Owens said.

And, again, it happened when Owens heckled Tony Romo over his relationship with Jessica Simpson. “With everything that has happened, obviously with the way Tony played and the comparison between her and Carrie Underwood, I think a lot of people feel she [Simpson] has taken his focus away,” Owens said. When will it ever stop?

For Dallas, it did. And that’s a good thing. ‘Cause Owens catches more off-the-field attention than he does passes in crunch time.