Michael Ventre

When Bill Parcells announced his retirement on Monday, he didn’t give a reason.

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.”

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That was in 1996, his last season with the Pats. Now he’s 10 years older, leaving his latest job at the age of 65. It should be noted that people are living longer these days, and 65 is the new 55.

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.

When Parcells was hired by Jones in 2003, both said all the right things. They needed to, because it was widely believed that a man like Jones, with an ego as big and wide as the whole state of Texas, would never relinquish control of football operations to a man who would accept nothing less, and Parcells would never agree to take the job in the first place if he felt as though Jones would make moves that would put theatricality ahead of sound football judgment.

But that’s what happened. It took a while, but when Jones brought in T.O., he helped shove Parcells out the door.