Perhaps “Watch Tower” is a misnomer for this post and it would be more appropriate to liberally borrow from Peter King’s Monday Morning Quarterback section titled “Factoid of the Week That Only Might Interest Me.”
In one of his PG Plus columns Ed Bouchette shared an interesting observation. He updated his readers on the whereabouts of Tom Donahoe, who is apparently working part time for ESPN.
Bouchette offered this about Donahoe’s relationship with Bill Cowher:
It was Donahoe who discovered Bill Cowher and their relationship worked well – for about two years. After that, their personalities clashed and it ultimately led to Dopnahoe’s [sic] firing after the 1999 season.
This is the first time a journalist, to my knowledge, has publicly put a hard date on the souring of the relationship between Cowher and Donahoe.
Donahoe’s comments following Fog Bowl II, when the then Director of Football Operations criticized the team’s intensity, were the first unmistakable public signal of a rift between the two men.
Previously, in an on-line chat, Bouchette had responded to a question about when the relationship went south by explaining that things deteriorated gradually between the men.
The two year comment is interesting, because for whatever the personality conflicts might have arose between the two men, they did not seriously impact the team’s drafting until about 1996. That year they drafted Jamain Stephens in the first round who was an unmitigated bust.
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