Skip Bayless deserves to be unhappy. The ultra-contrarian sportpundit may be the dimmest bulb in ESPN’s flickering candelabra of low-wattage sports intellects, and his unflagging fidelity to his goofy “I think the exact opposite of you about sports” brand has a braying stridency that almost makes being a sports fan seem disreputable by association, if only because Bayless is a sports fan, too. Bayless who touted Aaron Eckhart over Heath Ledger as the best performance in the last Batman movie; Bayless who has maybe six ongoing one-sided beefs with very famous athletes he thinks are “quitters” or “selfish” or whatever. Bayless, who hates Terrell Owens the way that most of us hate, like, genocide. So Owens makes Bayless unhappy, which is probably the right thing to do. Is there anything else positive to be said about T.O., even after he tallied 213 receiving yards in Week 12?

As a football player, sure. But what makes your author sympathetic to Owens — as long as he doesn’t think too hard about what a goofily monomaniacal weenie he (Owens) is — is the fact that he so stands out as an individual in a league that increasingly fetishizes anti-individuality. In the brutishly corporate NFL — the league that Bayless and goofs like him love for its “discipline” — Owens is somehow still pretending that the game’s all about him. When he’s giving near-tearful interviews about how he wants the ball more, he’s ridiculous; he’s also ridiculous when he acts like he brokered a Middle East peace accord after gaining 213 yards against the (freaking) 49ers. But his outsized goofery is at least a reminder — a welcome one, after all that sour, silly seriousness and glumly macho pomp — that this is, finally, a game.

And his passion — misguided though it may be — is a bright contrast to the Seahawks sad, boring shuffle through coach Mike Holmgren’s final season. Seattle’s thin, aging roster was hard to like at the start of the season, and was effectively destroyed by injuries by Week 4. Many of the team’s erstwhile stars are back, but the team remains terrible. Still, they lose in a reliably “professional” way — sticking to their game plan, getting out-played by better teams and then, at least in the case of QB Matt Hasselbeck, apologizing for mistakes in over-the-top, Soviet-show-trial fashion. Holmgren is a clot on the sidelines, affectless and walrusian, no emotion every darkening his plump, mustachioed face. The defense has been awful, and Holmgren’s West Coast Offense — designed to obviate individual stars (which the team does not have) in favor of some goofball scientistic Hegelian philosophy of “rhythm” — isn’t working. It all has the feel of the end of an era; considering the dull era this team represents, that’s not entirely a bad thing.

It would be a Bayless-ian feat of meaningless counter-intuition to posit the uber-narcissistic T.O. as a desirable alternative to what the fading ‘Hawks represent. T.O.’s hobbies are watching slo-mo videos of himself running on the beach and shopping for sunglasses. He’s not the desirable alternative to anything. But as his team begins to resemble the explosive, exciting squad they were last year, T.O. and the ‘Boys are at least a reminder that there is an alternative to the corporate “professionalism” that sportpundits so love.

The Cowboys creative, protean offense is almost excessively fun to watch; at some point, coordinator Jason Garret should probably call more dull running plays for the brilliantly bludgeoning RB Marion Barber. The defense has been equally effective and increasingly attuned to its stars’ strengths since head coach Wade Phillips took over the play-calling last month. They’re the Cowboys, and still annoying for that reason, but Dallas is great fun to watch at its best, and a great reminder that some humanity — even if it’s T.O.-style anti-humility — goes a long way in the NFL. Yes, they’re still owned by Jerry Jones, their corny “mystique” represents basically everything that’s wrong with American culture, etc. But Dallas builds its game plan around talented players, rather than flattening them towards dull, Holmgren-y competence. That’s something to celebrate, and if it makes Skip Bayless angry, all the better.

COWBOYS BY 13