Terrell Owens’ lone season in Buffalo was supposed to add a spark to the Buffalo Bills‘ passing attack. Instead, 2009 unraveled into one of the most talked-about disappointments of his career. Now, years removed from that chapter, Owens isn’t holding back on who he thinks was really responsible for the mess under center.

A fan fired shots at the former WR, pointing out how the key to the city given by Mayor Byron Brown was revoked because Owens failed to meet the demand of scoring 10 touchdowns, and the Bills failed to make the playoffs. Another fan came to Owens’ defense.

“55-829-5 while averaging 15.1 per rec seems solid for a 36-year-old WR with terrible QB play while the QBs combined for a total of 15 TD passes lol”

“Thank you @Brentdoesstuff !” Owens wrote back, reposting that message.

Buffalo signed Terrell Owens hoping he’d help the passing game and give quarterback Trent Edwards someone reliable to throw to. It sounded good in theory. But the Bills didn’t improve. They finished 7-9 for the third year in a row and stayed stuck in a playoff drought that would last until 2017, the longest in the NFL at that time.

Owens signed a one-year, $6.5 million deal that season at age 36; by the numbers alone, it wasn’t a disaster. He caught 55 passes for 829 yards and five touchdowns, averaging a strong 15.1 yards per catch. He also set a franchise record with a 98-yard touchdown reception against Jacksonville, thrown by Ryan Fitzpatrick, and he became just the sixth player in NFL history to reach 1,000 career receptions.

The Bills ran through three different starters that season, Fitzpatrick, Edwards, and Brian Brohm, who combined for just 15 touchdown passes all year. Fitzpatrick started nine games, Edwards six, and Brohm didn’t see the field at all.

Owens said the difference between how he played most of the season and how he played the last two weeks came down to one thing: the quarterback. According to him, it was all about who was throwing him the ball.

“If you kind of just think about opportunities that we’ve had during the course of the season, I’ve been open, and I’ve been overthrown, and I’ve been underthrown,” Owens said that time. “And those are some of those opportunities that were missed. Now, with Fitz back there, there are opportunities, and I feel like I’m a part of the offense, whereas earlier, those feelings and those opportunities, I didn’t feel that they were there.”

He clearly believed his numbers would have looked a lot different with Fitzpatrick running things from Week 1. And the split backs him up in a way. Through the first nine games, he was averaging under three catches and just 40.7 yards a game. Over his final two, that jumped to seven catches and 146.5 yards.

Despite everything, Owens didn’t walk away from Buffalo bitter. Years later, in 2017, he tweeted that he genuinely loved his time with the Bills, pointing specifically to how passionate the fanbase was during his lone season there. The wide receiver went to the Cincinnati Bengals after 2009, and retired after the 2010 season.

Still, the narrative around that season wasn’t really about the stat. It was about “The T.O. Show,” his VH1 reality series that debuted that July, following Owens as he navigated his personal life with his publicist and a close friend along for the ride. A lot of critics figured the show was where his real focus went that year, not Sunday afternoons in Buffalo.

However, not everyone at Buffalo hates Owens, despite him not posting impressive numbers. He returned to Highmark for Thurman Thomas’ jersey retirement ceremony and received an ovation louder than when he was inducted into the San Francisco 49ers Hall of Fame, per The Athletic.

“Dude, honestly it gets me a little choked up now just from taking myself back to that night,” Owens told the publication. “As soon as they recognized that I was in that stadium, just the response that I got, you would have thought that I spent my entire career there in Buffalo.”