T.O.o Much Drama

Temperamental (accent on “mental”) Iggles receiver Terrell Owens was booted from training camp today and suspended for a week by coach Andy Reid after an altercation following a team practice. ESPN.com reports that the newly svelte Iggles coach expelled the excitable All-Pro after Owens “dropped an expletive” during the post-practice argument. Owens was available to reporters later at his New Jersey home.

This latest outburst comes on the heels of the most publicized will-he-or-won’t-he holdouts in NFL history, and one of the most absurd. After demanding a trade from the Niners prior to the 2004 season, Owens was moved to Philly (after first nixing a deal that would have sent him to Baltimore) and signed a 7-year contract worth nearly $49 million. After leading the Iggles to the Super Bowl in his first year, Owens and agent Drew Rosenhaus decided that T.O. wasn’t being properly compensated as one of the top paid receivers in the league and decided to hold out to renegotiate his already lucrative contract even further.

Obviously, there has already been a lot of crap written and said over the past few months about the whole T.O. situation, so I won’t waste your time or mine talking about how he is a petulant child with a snake for an agent who literally BEGGED to be sent to Philly then was unavailable to his team when they most needed him—the last six weeks of the regular season, all of the playoffs until the Super Bowl—and they won all but the final two regular season games without him. Or that he’s trying to renegotiate a 7 year contract after only one year. Or that he’s complaining about making ONLY $20 million over the next 3 years. Or that, if Donovan McNabb wasn’t as good a team leader as he is, T.O. could tear this lockerroom apart with his pouting and complaining. No, I won’t bother since I’m sure that is all we’ll be hearing about on SportsCenter and SI for next month anyway.

At least we won’t be hearing about it from training camp.