If TO Were Still a Cowboy...

A look at what Dallas's off-season might look like if no. 81 was still in town

By SCOTT M. CRISP

Updated 9:30 PM CST, Thu, Jun 25, 2009

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Terrell Owens is gone and the Dallas Cowboys are having a quiet and productive off-season thus far.

How much these two are connected is arguable, but it certainly seems like the utilitarian stance of the organization (or at least, relatively utilitarian stance) would be borderline impossible with number 81 still getting his checks from Jerry Jones.

Owens will follow in the footsteps of washed up glam-rockers and late-eighties hype-men later this summer, with the debut of his reality show on VH1, in which he and his best friends/publicists will reevaluate the controversial receiver’s personal life. What this entails, given the usual standards of VH1 programming, I shudder to think.

But Owens is a hopeless exposure-addict, and he couldn’t wait that long; he participated recently in ABC’s “Superstars,” a revival of the seventies format that pairs celebrities with athletes for outlandish competitions.

Somewhat fittingly, Owens and his teammate, model Joanna Krupa, did not get along. They were bounced after the first episode, with Krupa calling Mr. Getcha-Popcorn-Ready a “prima donna.”

Tonight, he will be a guest on Comedy Central’s Tosh.0, in a segment called web redemption, making light of the press conference in which he shed tears in defense of “his quarterback,” Tony Romo.

All this, and it’s only mid-June.

This doesn’t make Owens a bad person, or, to use Ms. Krupa’s terminology, a prima donna. However, if Owens were still in blue and silver, it would have made him—surprise, surprise—a distraction to the team and a gold mine for writers on slow news days.

A testament to the degree to which Owens commands headlines is the fact that he still dominates Cowboys’ message boards and blogs, making him roughly the NFL equivalent of Octomom a few months ago; love him or hate him, you can’t help but talk about him and, because of this, it seems that he’ll never go away.

So what would Dallas’s off-season looked like with Terrell Owens on the roster?

With the team working out, preparing for the season in relative quiet, we’ll probably never find out.

And this is a good thing.