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Owens declines HoF Ceremony Invitation


WizardHawk

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1 minute ago, Ragnarok said:

I personally don't think they could have kept to their guns for too much longer without becoming the bad guys.  Voting him in now allowed them to make it look like it was just the normal course of events while sticking it to him for a while.  He was getting in very soon.

In all truth it worked out perfectly for the voters. They got to watch him have a meltdown for a couple of years and make a fool of himself with the gold jacket stunt, got a bunch of people to defend him and make him a sympathetic figure, then they let him in before it was ridiculously long and he couldn't help himself and did something that just looks like a slap in the face to all the HOF'ers who defended him and voters who said he deserved the honor. 

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5 minutes ago, PapaShogun said:

Yeah he doesn't have to. I'm responding to the comment that said people should wait until he does, which he said he was going to do. 

Yes, I do think people should have to wait.

I mean, assuming that him not attending is going to reflect on his "new team" and hold him/them back on future ventures with said new team is very premature until TO himself addresses it. 

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Just now, sp6488 said:

On item #1, is that seriously your best defense of his actions there?  Do you not see how that would be indicative of the type of person he is?  How is it that thousands of players who likely didn't have the best relationship with other guys they played with were able to avoid doing something like that?  How is it that TO was the only one who ended up going to a major magazine to make derogatory comments about the sexuality of a former teammate?  Do you not see how that could be seen as VERY strong evidence re: his quality as a teammate?

On item #2, I'm not particularly impressed that you are "refuting" specific items I never brought up.  Anyone who was watching football at the time could tell that there was a rift between the two.  Here's a story from 2006 (with extensive direct quotes from McNabb).  CLEARLY, McNabb thought that TO had created a rift in the locker room.  But sure, keep saying that there was no rift between the two players. http://www.espn.com/nfl/news/story?id=2315565

On your final statement, you have a real Bielefeld Conspiracy thing going now.  Apparently, anyone who can provide support evidence that TO was indeed divisive really just shows how deep the movement to besmirch him goes.

1. How can you be a bad teammate for implying something about the sexual preference of a guy (when asked) WHO ISN'T EVEN YOUR TEAMMATE? And what does it have to do with the locker room, since THEY WEREN'T TEAMMATES ANYMORE? Hey, maybe what Owens did helped the Eagles, since the Eagles played the Browns that year and beat them. Perhaps Owens divided the Browns locker room by causing a distraction amongst the Browns players, and in weakening them helped his team, the Eagles, beat them in a close game. Wow, he's an even better teammate than before!

And you have no idea what other players are saying about former teammates, because most of them do it anonymously. https://owensdefense.wordpress.com/2016/02/13/anonymous-sources/

Most of them are too cowardly to attach their name to what they say. 

2. There was a rift between the two because the media took things Owens said completely out of context to make them look like shots at McNabb. McNabb took offense when he heard Owens accused him of getting tired in the Super Bowl, even though that's not what Owens was doing (Owens was referencing what Fraley, Mitchell, and Runyan said in attempting to take a shot at the media for criticizing him for trying to play in the Super Bowl/questioning his physical conditioning. He was pointing out the irony of how they were now talking about McNabb getting tired in the Super Bowl when before the game, they were saying he wouldn't be ready).

You have no evidence. The conspiracy theorists are the ones who insist all of Owens's former teammates who say he was a great teammate are just liars, and that this former 89th round pick country bumpkin from a division 1-AA school single-handedly divided/destroyed rosters of 50+ men with the power of his presence. But despite all of that, the teams he played on nearly all had winning records.

Oh, and somehow, these "distractions" that were sooooo "disruptive" to his teams didn't affect him. John Doe was so affected by all this media stuff about Terrell Owens, but Owens himself - the subject of everything - was able to go out there and put up Hall of Fame numbers.

 

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Just now, PapaShogun said:

Possibly. Depends on if the voters really gave a **** about public outcry. Especially since they can hide under the cloak of anonymity with their votes. 

Personally I think Ray Lewis and Randy Moss getting in was the best thing for Owens' chances. 

Now I do think your second point has a lot of validity.  How many guys with questionable legal issues and off-field behavior can you let in before it becomes obvious that you are just sticking it to Owens?

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1 minute ago, lancerman said:

In all truth it worked out perfectly for the voters. They got to watch him have a meltdown for a couple of years and make a fool of himself with the gold jacket stunt, got a bunch of people to defend him and make him a sympathetic figure, then they let him in before it was ridiculously long and he couldn't help himself and did something that just looks like a slap in the face to all the HOF'ers who defended him and voters who said he deserved the honor. 

Agreed.

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1 minute ago, PapaShogun said:

Possibly. Depends on if the voters really gave a **** about public outcry. Especially since they can hide under the cloak of anonymity with their votes. 

Personally I think Ray Lewis and Randy Moss getting in was the best thing for Owens' chances. 

See I think the opposite. I think if they really wanted to stick it to TO they could have said he had to wait one more year so Moss could go in first ballot. I get the point you are making, but it would have been the ultimate way to taint it a bit for him by using it to kind of cut old wounds on the Moss vs TO debate. 

 

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1 minute ago, lancerman said:

See I think the opposite. I think if they really wanted to stick it to TO they could have said he had to wait one more year so Moss could go in first ballot. I get the point you are making, but it would have been the ultimate way to taint it a bit for him by using it to kind of cut old wounds on the Moss vs TO debate. 

 

Not saying you are wrong in your assessment, but if I may provide a counterpoint...

If they suspected he would do something like this, it would be the deepest cut of all.  He and Moss are compared for obvious reasons.  One of them is there, the other is not.  Even if it would have been a bigger slap in the face for Moss to get in before him, this way Moss has his day and TO is never up on the podium (and for self-inflicted reasons at that).

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1 minute ago, sp6488 said:

Not saying you are wrong in your assessment, but if I may provide a counterpoint...

If they suspected he would do something like this, it would be the deepest cut of all.  He and Moss are compared for obvious reasons.  One of them is there, the other is not.  Even if it would have been a bigger slap in the face for Moss to get in before him, this way Moss has his day and TO is never up on the podium (and for self-inflicted reasons at that).

But I don't think they suspected this. And I think his last major NFL accolade being overshadowed with the obvious implication that he needed to wait on Moss for it would be the coup de grace if they really wanted to sour it for him. I think they didn't want to be that cold. It also was a good buffer because if TO went up and was a tool about it, the easy way to embarass him would be for someone to say "and now the best WR to be inducted tonight". 

 

But overall I think they were trying to spare his feelings a bit 

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And might I add, in the interest of fairness, since his name has been brought up: The Randy Moss "I play when I want to play" comment was also taken out of context by the media. He was being asked if Cris Carter was what motivated him to play, and Moss was saying he didn't need anyone to motivate him to play. His quote was, "I play when I want to play." Meaning, when he plays hard, it has nothing to do with someone else telling him to. 

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23 minutes ago, PapaShogun said:

A lot of those players also didn't have as polarizing a personality as Owens did. 

Not saying that Owens wouldn't have made it definitively, but it's impossible to know how many years it would have taken. 

He was a HoFer and he deserved to be there. No question asked.

If TO didn't get in, sooner rather later, that would have been a huge mistake on the part of voters. It would've sent the wrong message because TO was only being vilified for his ON-FIELD antics and not OFF-FIELD issues such as others. 

 If TO didn't get in, that would've meant that the NFL cares more about how a player acts on the field than it does off-the-field. And that';s not a good look.

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26 minutes ago, lancerman said:

Because. 

1. It really isn't unprecedented for a super elite level WR who ranked very highly all time to still have to wait a few years. 

2. It is incredibly unprecedented for someone of that level to have to wait long enough to have possibly died. His worst case scenario was waiting as long as Cris Carter.

Good argument to be made Owens is the third best WR of all time. Rice and Moss were both first ballot guys. Hutson was a first ballot guy. Owens is probably the highest rated WR of all time to not be a first ballot guy.

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Just now, AlexGreen#20 said:

Good argument to be made Owens is the third best WR of all time. Rice and Moss were both first ballot guys. Hutson was a first ballot guy. Owens is probably the highest rated WR of all time to not be a first ballot guy.

Again Cris Carter when he retired was 2nd behind Rice all time in receptions and TD's and 4th in yards. He also had retired incredibly high in single season records. Carter waited alot longer than TO when Carter was easily the statistical 2nd to Rice at the time. 

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1 minute ago, lancerman said:

Again Cris Carter when he retired was 2nd behind Rice all time in receptions and TD's and 4th in yards. He also had retired incredibly high in single season records. Carter waited alot longer than TO when Carter was easily the statistical 2nd to Rice at the time. 

Carter was an unexplosive possession receiver.

Career touchdowns of 40 yards or more: Owens 40, Carter 13. 

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5 minutes ago, NFLExpert49 said:

And might I add, in the interest of fairness, since his name has been brought up: The Randy Moss "I play when I want to play" comment was also taken out of context by the media. He was being asked if Cris Carter was what motivated him to play, and Moss was saying he didn't need anyone to motivate him to play. His quote was, "I play when I want to play." Meaning, when he plays hard, it has nothing to do with someone else telling him to. 

That and years later Cris Carter basically said that he told Moss that he was going to have to take some plays off to keep fresh because they were always going to put their best on him. Which is another big part of it. 

Overall it is an incredibly out of context quote that people have used to mean Moss didn't care to play hard unless he felt like it. Which was so far from the truth

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Just now, lancerman said:

Again Cris Carter when he retired was 2nd behind Rice all time in receptions and TD's and 4th in yards. He also had retired incredibly high in single season records. Carter waited alot longer than TO when Carter was easily the statistical 2nd to Rice at the time. 

Chris Carter played in the league for 16 seasons. I won't call him an accumulator because he did have an awesome peak, but it wasn't to the caliber of Owens'.

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