Sports Note of the Day

Sorry if I gave some of you a bit of whiplash... going from Geek Note to Sports Note in consecutive posts is bound to cause some disorientation.

Anyway, I was watching the Steelers - Eagles game just now and was musing over how much I hated Terrell Owens. To me he represents all the reasons many people I know prefer college football over the NFL... unless your coach is a fraud, you just can't get away with doing what he does in the public eye. Not that you should be able to do it in the NFL, but that's the culture nowadays, and he is the poster child.

I loathe him so much that I think he will become my personal standard by which I will measure all other things I can't stand... normally I would use Dubya as my standard, but then everything would be in really small fractions of Dubya. Whatever T.O.'s faults, he's not Bush and so his lower absolute value will probably be an easier relative standard to use. We'll see how that works out...

Back to the game... things have been going well for the Eagles thus far in the season. T.O. has caught a lot of touchdowns, been a mainstay on the hightlight reels, and the Eagles are 7-0. But (and there is always a "but"), they have never faced adversity, and that is when the real T.O. comes out to shine... and by shine, I mean be a team-destroying jackass.

The Steelers put the Eagles in such a position today, and T.O. remained true to form... late in the first half, he berated McNabb for about 40 seconds on the sideline. McNabb tried to walk away and passively show that he wasn't interested in such hectoring, but T.O. persisted. McNabb, to his credit, never bit the whole time.

Am I making too much out of the situation? Usually it takes some time to go through the cyclic mediation/resolution/renewal of conflict before the team splits into camps and the in-fighting begins. The team might not suffer from this for a while...

... or am I wrong?

Later in the game the Eagles were on a good drive during which several passes had been completed T.O. McNabb dropped back again, but faced a lot of pressure and was wrapped up. Rather than take the sack, McNabb used his strength to stay upright for one more split second to get the ball off to a short route. However, he had no zip on the ball and it was picked.

Was it because they were down by 18 and he was trying to do too much? Or did he just not want to go back to the sideline to hear yet again about how T.O. was wide open and that he was a putz for getting sacked and ruining the drive? Ultimately we can only speculate, but I have been in these situations many times before and if I was laying a bet, I think T.O. would be giving daddy a new pair of shoes...

Update:

Final Score of 27-3... poor T.O. I can't wait to see the fall-out... let the real game begin!