The ultimately doomed relationship between Terrell Owens and the Dallas Cowboys might have ended for any number of reasons, but Wade Phillips is certainly not one of them; that much, at this point, is clear.
With Terrell Owens in town for his football camp at Duncanville High School and Jerry Jones disassociating himself from “the player,” Wade Phillips got a shining evaluation.
"Wade is a great coach," Owens said. "Definitely when I was there, we made things work. We just didn't execute on the football field. There's a lot of things you can always point back to the coach, but the players are the ones that really make the things happen on the football field. Bottom line, we didn't get it done."
Owens is right.
Perhaps this makes any deconstruction of the relationship moot and ultimately irrelevant; the fact is, the Terrell Owens experiment failed not because of his sizeable personality, petty squabbles or the palpable hand of Jerry Jones.
It failed because, at the end of the day, Dallas failed to execute.
This is a frustrating conclusion drawn from a failed relationship that has been evaluated and deconstructed so many times that the picture has become jumbled and unclear.
It seems that the relationship that seemed so perfect -- perfect enough to make Dallas fans forget about the star-Owens-Smith-Teague incident -- that it’s hard to accept that its ultimate downfall was something so simple.
They say winning cures all, in professional sports. Losing, then, afflicts all.
It is for that -- and that only -- that Terrell Owens is northeast-bound.
