As reported yesterday, highly controversial and decreasingly useful wide receiver Terrell Owens may or may not be possibly headed to the Chicago Bears or some other team or actually not leaving the Buffalo Bills any time soon.

While the question of “Will they?” may not be answered for some time, it seems the question of “Should they?” weighs bigger on Chicago fans’ minds. How has this city treated outcast players in the past? Would an ego as famously large as Owens’ fly here? What will become of Devin Aromashodu? As with most sports hypotheticals, Chicago sports history has a wealth of precedents to share:

1995-1998: Dennis Rodman, Bulls forward
Ah, Rodman. With the possible exception of Bill Laimbeer, there was no Detroit Piston more hated around this city than “The Worm.” He was violent in the paint, he was brutal on the perimeter, he was a ridiculous spectacle off the court and had embarrassed the Bulls time and again in the playoffs. But worst of all? Rodman was good. Real good. Defensive Player of the Year good. League-best shooting percentage good. When the Bulls peeled him off the Spurs’ scrap heap, a lot of us were certain Rodman had come here to murder us all; three titles, one head-butted ref and a strategically-kicked photographer later, dude was nothing less than a legend.

2000: John Starks, Bulls shooting guard
The Bulls, you may recall, were terrible that year. Starks was only a Bull for four games of that miserable 17-65 campaign, but Starks was also still the guy who set up the most offensive call of my young sportswatching life in the 1994 Eastern Conference Finals. Starks also had earned a reputation as a hothead around the league, notably in two separate clashes with coach Don Nelson and slightly less notably in his Rodman-lite approach to defense. But still, by 2000, the Bulls and Starks had become complementary forms of useless. Four games. Zero starts. Eighty-two minutes. Terrible. That’s all you need to know about John Starks in Chicago. And hey, Ron Artest was on that team too! Although that was (mostly) before the (seriously) crazy; Indiana, obviously, made him lose it. But Indiana will do that to a man.

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You know, Dennis Rodman is really speaking to my soul here. I feel as if I’m sitting out at Walden Pond with Emerson and Thoreau, absorbing New Thought and Transcendentalism like a perfect little understudy.

But no, I’m sitting at my desk on my laptop on a sunny Chicago morning, watching a video of Dennis Rodman drunk in the back of a limo.

Actually, I guess it’s pretty much the same thing.