When it comes to the Hall of Fame, at least the baseball one, worthy candidates have been held out for gambling, steroid use and in the case of poor Shoeless Joe Jackson for sheer vindictiveness.
The NFL Hall of Fame is different. They keep a player out if he’s an A-hole.
How else to explain why Terrell Owens didn’t get elected this past weekend to the Hall of Fame?
Only Jerry Rice has more receiving yards than Owens. Only Rice and Randy Moss have more receiving touchdowns than Owens.
I count 25 wide receivers in the Hall. Owens was better than at least two-thirds of them.
Bob Hayes, John Stallworth and Don Maynard are all in. Owens isn’t. What a joke. Hayes was the fastest player in football, but he had trouble catching, running routes and couldn’t play in cold weather. Stallworth wasn’t even the best receiver on his own team. Maynard occasionally would catch a bomb from Joe Namath. That was his contribution.
Owens made his quarterbacks great not the other way around. Making Owens’ omission even more brutal is he didn’t even make the final 10 cutdown.
Owens played for three teams. He ended up having bad relations with each one, but in the era of free agency many players switch teams.
Yes Owens was a jerk and a diva. He also caught nine passes for 122 yards in a Super Bowl game for the Eagles despite having suffered a broken leg and torn ankle ligaments just seven weeks before the game. He was advised by doctors not to play that he would be risking the rest of his career. So there are different ways to measure just how good of a teammate he really was.
Bottom line: Those who voted against Owens don’t have a right to play moral policeman.
