The topic of conversation was Terrell Owens — the sometimes mercurial, currently team-less, six-time Pro Bowl receiver and reality TV star to whom the Cincinnati Bengals owner had just offered a contract.
The implication — since during the offseason he also added Antonio Bryant, Adam “Pacman” Jones and Matt Jones, all talents with past warts — was that Brown is football’s Father Flanagan, his fedora replacing that starched roman collar.
“I don’t profess to do anything other than judge people by the way I see them,” Brown said “I’m not going to defend that. I have the right to do it ... and I chose to do it.
“I think most people have good in them ... Sometimes it’s our job to get it out of them.”
While that didn’t work with Odell Thurman and was a mixed bag with the late Chris Henry, it worked wonderfully last season with Cedric Benson and Larry Johnson.
The experiment with Owens, though, would make the biggest splash, and it certainly dominated the talk at the pre-training camp media luncheon at Paul Brown Stadium on Monday, July 26.
Just as the St. Louis Rams were saying they were no longer pursuing Owens — who had a mediocre season with the quarterback-deficient Buffalo Bills last year, catching 55 passes for 829 yards and five touchdowns — Brown was saying he’d like to add him to what’s already the most talented Bengals team in decades.
“It’s his call, but I think he could help us. I judge him by what I see, and I like what I saw when I talked to him,” Brown said of his March conversation with Owens. “When he was here, I was surprised. He is not at all the way his public image is reported. ...
“Yes people can make mistakes but that doesn’t mean they go on the rest of their lives making mistakes. They can get their ship pointed in the right direction. This is a 36-year-old man. He’s been through a lot. He’s a proven player.”
And lately he’s been proving himself to Carson Palmer. The Bengals quarterback has been working out with him on the West Coast and has been so impressed, he’s been calling coach Marvin Lewis, lobbying him to pick up Owens.
What may have struck a deeper chord with Lewis are the reports from former Bengals quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick — now with Buffalo — who said Owens was a perfect teammate last season. He didn’t publicly pummel the Bills quarterback the way he had chastised Jeff Garcia and Donovan McNabb earlier in his career.
As the day went on Monday, Lewis seemed less tempered in his embrace of Owens: “Terrell gives you a proven threat. We’ve witnessed it. We’ve tried to prevent it. I saw him do it to us when we played Dallas and when he was with San Francisco in 2003. And I saw him do it in ’02 when I was in Washington.
“You think he’s on reality TV now? You ought to be on that sideline watching him do it. That’s real reality TV.”
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