The Monday Night Football incident is a sure sign that the NFL has "run its course," so to speak, from a fan's perspective. The NFL has so completely saturated the market from a sports fan's perspective that it's only growth prospect is in selling the kind of silly crap that we now see before, during, and after NFL games.
The NFL "jumped the shark" when it began marketing the Super Bowl as an extravaganza instead of as a sporting event. Any serious football fan will tell you that over the last couple of decades the conference championship games have been more interesting than the Super Bowls. The reason for this is simple: the Super Bowl is aimed at an audience that doesn't know much about football (typically suburban women). Once the NFL fully saturated that market, they had to move on to the final frontier -- adolescent kids (which explains why two morons like Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake were the featured performers at the halftime show last year).
The Terrell Owens controversy is simply the natural extension of the "non-fan" marketing concept from the Super Bowl to Monday Night Football.
>>The biggest losers of all are the NFL and NBA, because they are two professional sports leagues on the brink of a steep decline
What about the NHL which isn't even playing due to a lockout...will fans discover life will still go on
with no "shot-score!!!!!!" ?