T.O. drove Tuna out of coaching
Weird receiver embodies everything coach hates about modern NFL
![]() Matt Slocum / AP file Bill Parcells talks with wide receiver Terrell Owens during summer practice. |
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But I think everybody knows the reason.
I won’t mention any names, but his initials are T.O. Industrious readers can Google the Cowboys’ roster, run their fingers down the list and identify the culprit.
And to be fair, it might not necessarily be T.O. the walking distraction, the serial stationary cyclist, the faux suicide attempter, the chronic football-dropper, who is the single biggest reason why Parcells resigned.
No, it has more to do with what T.O. represents. To Parcells, T.O. stood for “Do I really need this aggravation?”
T.O. is just the embodiment of everything Parcells dislikes. The coach also had other demons within the same haunted house that T.O. inhabited, including Jerry Jones, Tony Romo and a brutally inept secondary.
Parcells is one of football’s greatest living coaches, and he’s right up there with a lot of the dead ones too. But he is as prickly as he is gifted. He’s at the point in his curmudgeonly career where he doesn’t want to have even the mildest annoyance foisted upon him. So you can see how he might react to Owens, the sports world’s preeminent loony tune.
When he was head coach of the New England Patriots, he infamously remarked about owner Robert Kraft’s reluctance to let him make personnel decisions: “If they want you to cook the dinner, at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries.”
Not so with football coaches, however, and especially those as tormented as Parcells. In football years, he’s more like 80, 85. He’s the geezer who recalls wistfully a time when football players had respect for rules and a passion for the game. He’s the dinosaur who once roamed the earth proudly, but soon became extinct. He’s the old man at the nursing home tossing a bowl of soup at his caregiver in disgust.
But that’s what happened. It took a while, but when Jones brought in T.O., he helped shove Parcells out the door.
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