The T.Ocho Show talk show featuring Chad Ochocinco and Terrell Owens on Versus garnered headlines when either one of the players popped off. For instance, there was the time when Owens said Jason Garrett was the problem in Dallas, and he was quickly proven to be wrong when Garrett went 5-3 as an interim coach. Then the topper was towards the end of the season when Owens said the Bengals were underachieving from the top down — a direct implication of the coaching staff.
Neither player will likely be back with Cincinnati next season, and their antics have helped lead to Carson Palmer demanding a trade. You figure with all the controversy surrounding the team that many people would want to tune into their TV show to watch the weekly proverbial train crash. That line of thinking has not manifested.
The T.Ocho Show opened to embarrassingly low TV ratings — a 0.1 for their debut back in October. Sure, the ratings need to be taken in context compared to the audience the rest of the programming on Versus receives, but it still came in much lower than hockey on the network, for instance. There have been 16 episodes of the show, and the latest version registered a 0.1 with 123,000 viewers — a dropoff from Hockey Central before it, which had 184,000 viewers. What really commanded my attention was that their show did a 0.0 rating with 29,000 viewers the next night, but that was a re-run.
What this really tells us, besides that Chad Ochocinco and Terrell Owens really don’t matter to fans anymore, is that the NFL can thrive without divas. They don’t need touchdown dances or celebrations to draw monster ratings in games, and they don’t need loudmouths like these guys. That’s bad news for 81 and 85 moving forward, as many teams won’t be interested in signing either one as free agents.
