I knew it was going to be a long weekend when I got home Saturday and saw on ESPN News that the Philadelphia Eagles had suspended You Know Who (Terrell Owens) indefinitely. Since the media loves to call him by his initials, I will simply refer to him as Y.K.W. for the remainder of this article.

As sure as the sun does shine, on Sunday morning, the barrage began with ESPN’s “The Sports Reporters” (which is one of the best sports programs on TV). Y.K.W. got his obligatory conversation piece and the audience was whisked off to SportsCenter, where there was more Y.K.W. to discuss.

Never mind that ESPN News had been running the same vignette on Y.K.W. for the past 18 hours – there was plenty more to come. Sensing the oncoming fiasco of sports media hype, I decided to turn off the TV and do some research.

I visited every major sports news Web site I could think of and, as I expected, every single one had the story in huge letters (with accompanying photo) on its front page. Fox Sports, ESPN, The Sporting News, Sports Illustrated, CBS, NFL.com and The Associated Press were all guilty.

Out of morbid curiosity, I turned the NFL pre-game shows on – Y.K.W. was being featured or talked about on Fox, ESPN and CBS simultaneously. I checked back 15 minutes later and found the same result.

A few intelligent sports writers (Bob Ryan of The Boston Globe comes to mind) have mentioned that the media is giving this guy exactly what he wants. Every time Y.K.W. wants to run his mouth in front of a camera, members of the media line up in droves to listen, and sports writers follow suit by sounding off about whatever idiotic comments are made.

When are we going to wake up? When can we get back to covering the NFL and not one guy? This weekend the New England vs. Indianapolis game has been overshadowed, Joey Harrington made one of the most pathetic attempts to save a career I have ever witnessed, Michael Vick sounded off against his critics, LaDanian Tomlinson continued to play at another level and Ricky Williams scored a touchdown for the first time in forever. All of those good NFL stories were overshadowed by a petulant man-child.

I watched most of the first half of Sunday night’s Eagles-Redskins game and counted more than 20 mentions of Y.K.W. by name, before I was forced to turn it off in disgust. Let’s all be thankful the Eagles game wasn’t on Monday night when John Madden and company could have talked Y.K.W. into the ground.

This player clearly loves attention and seems to relish the attention he is being showered with far more than the game he plays for a living. He loves all the stir and controversy he has created, and all that members of the media have done is feed his ego. This guy is bad for the Eagles and bad for football. The sooner people in sports realize this, the better off we will all be. So, sports writers everywhere, do the world a favor and keep his name off your page, out of your mouth and, hopefully soon, out of public memory.

– Nathan Chiaravalloti is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Davenport.