With football season once again upon us, what better way to kick things off (so to speak) than to find an NFL numbskull for the Moron of the Week dishonors? This week, new Buffalo Bills wideout Terrell (Team Cancer) Owens managed not only to put himself in the media crosshairs by being part of the annual Hall of Fame game on Sunday night, but because of his peculiar notions about TV of a different sort. Namely, his (sur)reality TV show, and it’s minuscule viewership.
The show’s poor ratings came to light after John Ourand (SportsBusiness Journal) reported that the widely-publicized debut of The T.O. Show wound up at No. 798 in the cable television ratings for the week. That tied it with a 5:00 a.m. rerun of an old episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Not exactly an auspicious beginning. However, when T.O.’s reality show was panned by Jim Rome, Owens went out of his way to Tweet about how Rome is only hating on his show because he (Owens) won’t appear on Rome is Burning. Odd, seems to me Rome’s show gets decent enough ratings and a parade of guests coming through, from current stars to retired Hall of Famers to other well-known sports luminaries. Why would Rome lie in wait to sandbag Owens for not coming on his show, when the ratings themselves are the issue, and the ratings, frankly, suck.
But it gets better. When Ourand posted a follow-up via Twitter on the T.O. Show, it revealed that the second episode saw a ratings *drop,*tieing it for 862nd place, with a 3:30 a.m. airing of Brandy and Mr. Whiskers narrowly beating it out for the coveted 861st slot.
Owens’ explanation for the program’s poor showing? “those ratings r misleading, it’s based on a special box tht calculates those ratings n which every household doesn’t have.” (via Twitter.)
Huh? So because not every household has the ‘special box (i.e. a Nielsen ratings tracking box) the T.O. Show is somehow doing better than it looks on paper? Guess T.O. doesn’t understand that the Nielsen ‘special box’ is used in enough homes to statistically determine a reliable number of viewers. How does T.O. think the ‘special boxes’ are negatively representing him? Does he really think that he’s much better represented in the households without the ‘special boxes’? Is that what he’s claiming? That Neilsen families aren’t representative of viewing patterns (despite the Neilsen’s being almost universally accepted)? Let me get this straight. Everybody *with* the special boxes (and who apparently like repeats of sit-coms from the 1990s and Mr. Whiskers better than the prime-time broadcast of a brand new reality show revolving around the biggest thing to hit Buffalo since Jim Kelly) are misleading the rest of us?
No wonder Owens has such a poor grasp on his perception by the public and the media. Sure, Owens’ show is doing much better than we all understand—it’s just the folks with those ‘special boxes’ somehow not telling the truth. And Trent Edwards is the best quarterback he’s ever played with. And he really doesn’t know why Dallas let him go. And it was Jeff Garcia and Donovan McNabb ruining things for him in San Francisco and Philadelphia, not his own doing. Not even the real Week 1 of the NFL season, and Owens is already (albeit outside of football) opening his trap and making an ass out of himself. Wonder how long before it does turn to football? The reality show won’t air forever, so what happens when the focus is solely on the city’s football franchise now that expectations have been raised? Buffalo is running a high-pressure, no-huddle offense this season. They don’t have a single offensive lineman playing in the same spot they played in last year, and have replaced two starters outright. What happens when Buffalo’s offense runs the ball three times in a row? What will T.O. be saying when Edwards doesn’t get him the ball enough because he’s going to be on his back eight times a game? Maybe, just maybe, could we be seeing Owens back in the Moron of the Week spotlight sometime during the season? Odds are that if Buffalo is sub-.500 after week 7, even if he doesn’t quite rise to the top, he’ll be a significant runner-up.
