A year ago, receiver Terrell Owens tore an ACL. In October, he held a public workout that no team attended. That same day, 53 other players got private workouts with individual teams.
Since then, not a single NFL team has given Owens a workout, even though he has shown that he can play football, via his decision to play on a part-time basis in the Indoor Football League.
Even now, with 90 players on each team’s offseason roster, no one has offered Owens an opportunity to come in and show what he can do.
In an interview that will air Monday on 95.7 The Game in San Francisco (they’ve actually sent out a quote sheet), Owens says he’d like to play for the 49ers or the Raiders.
We wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this is part of a new strategy that entails appearing on a radio station in each NFL city and making a public pitch to play for the local team, like Chad Ochocinco did at Radio Row a few years ago when he was trying to get traded out of Cincinnati.
It’s sad, really. The NFL wants nothing to do with Owens, and yet he still desperately wants back in.
There’s a bizarre Bruce-Willis-in-The-Sixth-Sense quality to Owens’ depths of denial and delusion. His NFL career is dead, and we’re well past that moment at the end of the movie when the wedding ring hits the ground and everyone in the theater figures out what was going on.
And as to anyone for whom I’ve just spoiled the ending of a 13-year-old movie, you really need to get out more.