Owens tired of bad teammate remarks: ‘I’m confident in my character’

By theScore // Source, MSN News

Since snubbing Terrell Owens from the 2017 Pro Football Hall of Fame class, some voters have felt compelled to defend their beliefs that the receiver was a bad teammate and therefore doesn’t deserve to be apart of Canton.

As the 43-year-old isn’t generally one to sit in the back, quietly listening, Owens went on “The Tim Graham Show” Wednesday to dispel those notions and defend his position as a deserving Hall of Famer.

“I’m not gonna allow someone to step over me, run over me, none whatsoever,” Owens said on Wednesday, according to ESPN’s Mike Rodak. “I have a voice – I did that when I was in the locker rooms. I’m confident in my character and who I am. There have been guys that have spoken out on my behalf that were my teammates that witnessed some of the stuff that was going on.

“So it’s funny how they don’t take any of those quotes from these guys who were my teammates and coaches into consideration. Why is it only a select few? A select few can’t speak for the majority. So that’s why I say it’s a flawed process. The information they’ve been given is not accurate.”

Several Hall of Famers have voiced their opinion on whether they agree with the decision to keep Owens out of the Hall including Dan Fouts and Bill Polian, who agree with the stance, and Steve Young and James Lofton, who disagree.

Owens has taken exception to commenters like Polian and Fouts for claiming to know the receiver’s character while citing unnamed sources.

“Anybody that’s given them information behind closed doors or in your little whisper pods, then that doesn’t really mean a hill of beans to me,” he said. “You listen to guys like Bill Polian and Dan Fouts, who have said coaches and players have come to them, or pulled them to the side, and said I was a horrible teammate. That’s what really rubbed me the wrong way, because I know, number one, how I was raised.”

“When it comes to questioning my character and what I did in that locker room, the thing what a lot of people are missing is these coaches and these people are saying is I’m this type of person in the locker room. Well who are those guys? Nobody’s attached any names to anything.”

Owens holds a strong belief that his impressive statistics alone should get him into the Hall and the voters are using a flawed process to determine who reaches football immortality.

“I don’t need the Hall of Fame to validate what I did or who I am,” he said. “Obviously, what I did (in my career), the Hall of Fame, that should validate it.”