By Josh Katzowitz
Terrell Owens, with his money problems and desire to return to the NFL, has had a tough time staying out of the news in his first season out of the NFL. But late Wednesday night, Owens finally had some positive career news to share.
And now, it's official: Owens says he'll return to professional football with the Allen Wranglers of the Indoor Football League.
In a video he posted on Beeyoo.com, Owens proclaimed the following: "Uh-oh, it's official. It just went down. I'm headed back to Texas. That's right. IFL here I come. Allen, Tx., Here I come. I'm gonna be me. Allen, Tx., I'll see you in the end zone."
As we wrote before, players only make $225 per game in the IFL, and they get a bonus for winning. Owens' paycheck, though, figures to be much larger than that, as the Wranglers put out a story on their website last month that said his compensation package could be worth between $250,000-500,000 (it seems likely Owens would have an ownership stake in the franchise if that's the case).
"I'm sure Cowboys fans and all football fans in the area would love to get T.O. back." Wranglers coach Patrick Pimmel said last month. "Terrell would be a great addition to our organization and I hope we can make this happen."
Now, the Wranglers and Owens have. But that doesn't mean Owens isn't still causing controversy of the negative persuasion.
It came to light Wednesday that Owens made an accusation in the February issue of GQ in which he’s said that before he was to read an apology to his Eagles teammates for his behavior in 2005, Jeremiah Trotter told him not to read the section that was intended as an apology to Donovan McNabb.
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How about the decision not to publicly apologize to McNabb for suggesting in an interview immediately after the Eagles lost the Super Bowl that the quarterback had “got tired” on the field? For a moment, he is silent. Could he actually be on the verge of admitting he made an error?
“Well, I probably should have done...,” he begins, rubbing his hand along the contours of his massive shaved dome. Then he stops himself. “No. No. Listen, I was in the locker room before the press conference, and my team captain, Jeremiah Trotter, read through that apology they wrote for me. He got to the bottom part, the part where it had the stuff about Donovan, and he did this.” Owens snatches a piece of paper from the table and rips off the bottom three inches. “This is the team leader we’re talking about; he told me not to do it.”
Trotter, not surprisingly, was outraged by the accusation. In a text to the Inquirer on Wednesday night, Trotter wrote that Owens’ quotes were a “super lie.” Then, the former Eagles linebacker tweeted the following to Owens, “yo man y u lying to GQ Mag I never told u that call me ASAP!!!!!”
A few minutes later, Owens responded, “@jtrotter_54 lying about what?” Then, Owens sent Trotter a direct message with his contact information, so I assume the trail on that aspect of this story has run cold.
But Owens also had this to say in the GQ article, “To say I regret anything would be a slap in my grandmother’s face. Are there some things I might do differently now? Sure.”
Apologizing to McNabb apparently is not one of them. At the end of the excerpt, though, Owens got it exactly right. “I am not,” he says, “a tactful person.”
No, but once again, Owens is officially a professional football player. And he has all bunch of new teammates to whom he can be tactless.
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