Somehow this year I am more interested in football than usual. The playoff games are good and there are a lot of good teams who are on the brink of destiny. Also I work on lectures on my laptop during the games so it is not completely unproductive.
This morning there is a video clip of Terrel Owens crying a bit as he defends Tony Romo’s recent vacation to Mexico. Basically he says “back off my teammate – we lost as a team” and then he breaks up a bit in a tough manly way. He breaks up in a way that if you made fun of him – he would pound you into dust.
Here is my point – this is leadership. Terrell Owens is a veteran player – he knows what it is like to have the media ready to blame him for everything that went wrong.
Frankly for the Dallas Cowboys this has been a pretty good season – you don’t win the super bowl every year – and this year they did better than expected. For the media to define the season into a failure because of a close loss to a good team in the playoffs where Tony and the Cowboys played very well – but just game up on the slightly shorter end of the stick – would be a crime and not good for the Cowboys prospects next year.
So after the game, Terrell did what he knew he had to do. He did something that made sure that the attention was partially on Terrell and not exclusively on Tony for the next few days. As a veteran he stepped up and directed some of the media frenzy at himself to take some away from Tony. And it worked – CNN this morning talked more about Terrell than Tony.
And after a few days – no one will care. The media and fans will realize that this was a great season for the Cowboys and instead of looking for blame where there is none, they will get thinking about how to make next season better and supporting their quarterback. And Tony can learn from the loss and hopefully do better next year for the Cowboys and take them even further in the playoffs.
Class move Terrell.