NFL

T.O. a No-Show in Bills Debut

Posted Sep 15, 2009 12:50AM By Dan Graziano (RSS feed)

Filed Under: Bills, Patriots, AFC East, NFL Analysis

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It was a quiet night for Terrell Owens in his first gaame with the Buffalo Bills.FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- If Terrell Owens was upset at how few throws came his way in his first game as a Buffalo Bill, he wasn't saying. He wasn't talking, wasn't tweeting and wasn't complaining -- to anybody who might hear and make a big deal of it, at least. In Buffalo's heartbreaking loss to the Patriots on Monday night, Owens didn't catch a ball until there was 4:43 left in the third quarter. In all, he caught three -- two that counted in the final stats and one that was nullified by his own interference penalty.

But the VH1 reality star didn't have a thing to say about his night, or his team's. He sent a locker room attendant to fetch his clothes so he could dress out of sight and escape without doing interviews. And his Twitter page offered no insight.

"Congrats 2 the Pats!!" Owens tweeted one hour and five minutes after the game ended. "On the bus headed 2 airport. Cn't wait 2 get hm & get n the bed!"

(I still say he could get so much more in if he'd lay off the exclamation points, but hey -- to each his own.)

"We'll b ready next week! I promise u that!!" came 11 minutes later.

"RIP Patrick Swayze!!" eight minutes later. Then after that, it's basically him and Chad Ochocinco tweeting about the fact that the latter is in New Orleans for some reason.

Anyway, the Bills' people said Monday that they consider Owens and Lee Evans both to be No. 1 receivers, that they don't believe teams will be able to double-cover both of them and that whichever one draws the extra coverage in a given week, the other will have to play like a No. 1. It sounds good, but you have to wonder whether Owens agrees with the plan and its bedrock assessment.

"I'm not going to put any words in his mouth," Bills QB Trent Edwards said. "I really feel like he's a competitor. I've said that all along, and that's rubbing off on the rest of us. Frustrated or not, he's still raising the level of our game, so we need to feed off that. He's obviously a big weapon in our offense, so we need to keep getting him the ball."

Monday night, Edwards threw six balls to Evans, three to Owens, four each to tight ends Derek Schouman and Shawn Nelson, one to Roscoe Parrish and seven to running back Fred Jackson. He said he felt the Patriots did a good job of taking the deep ball away from Evans and Owens, and that he'd have to review film to see if he had more chances to find those guys than he thought he did.

Early reviews (meaning preseason and this first game) indicate that the Buffalo offense is going to be terrible, which is likely to limit what Owens does -- or what he has the opportunity to do -- all year. But we'll see. And we'll keep checking Twitter to see what @terrellowens has to say about the whole thing.

Tags: buffalo+bills, BuffaloBills, lee+evans, LeeEvans, terrell+owens, TerrellOwens, trent+edwards, TrentEdwards

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