Back in 2019, legendary San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Terrell Owens once ran into his Niners veteran Jerry Rice at the airport on Tuesday. Almost a decade after the two went their separate ways, T.O. conceded that Rice was the greatest.

“You heard it here from the horse’s mouth,” Owens said back then in a self-shot video with Rice laughing beside him. “He’s #1. I’m always gonna be 1A; anybody else, they can be #2. And if you wanna go 1,2,3, he can be #1, and I’ll be #2.”

A little over seven years after that chance encounter, Owens still refuses to be compared to the greatest wide receiver in 49ers’ football history. On the very first episode of his new podcast, Get To The Point, Owens sat down with Chris Spencer. When the conversation turned to Owens’ iconic touchdown celebrations, he casually noted that people around him often said: “Oh, I could be the next Jerry Rice.” But afterwards, Owens admitted, “I know I couldn’t be him.” In the next segment, Spencer went back to that quote and asked him how Owens could say that.

“Our route running,” Owens said. “My route running was terrible. There was a lot of things. The knowledge of the game. I didn’t really understand and know how to really read defenses coming from a small school. That’s no knock to them; it was just like I just didn’t really put a lot of emphasis on studying…I was just being athletic and just playing off my athleticism.

“The staple coverages, like cover one, cover two, but then when defensive coordinators start double-teaming me and start creating all these exotic coverages, especially when I was in San Fran, you got cover 44, cover 66, all these things, I had no idea. I had to stay out of practice because it became confusing. Then you have to understand hot reads and all these different blitzes and knowing when people are blitzing, rolling the coverages. It was overwhelming.”

Coming from Benjamin Russell (Alexander City) High School into Chattanooga, Owens made his presence felt by his physicality alone. At 6’3”, weighing 224 pounds, he could push through coverages and make big plays. But when he came to the NFL, that simple concept – effective against simple defenses – wouldn’t fly. On his podcast, Owens admitted half the time he didn’t know what was expected of him at the line of scrimmage.

Eventually, he figured out how to use his build to his advantage. He studied the game like never before, understood the route tree, and started reading the field better. The result – 3x NFL receiving touchdowns leader, 6 Pro Bowl nods, and 5 First-team All-Pro honors. And yet, none of this matched up against what Rice did in his tenure, and Owens admitted as much.

“So, I knew then I couldn’t be Jerry Rice,” Owens said. “We had two different body types. Jerry’s slender, finesse. He’s not the physical body that I have or whatever. So, I use those things to my advantage when needed. Jerry was just, he was just a technician. However you drew it on paper, he would run it just like that. [He] would have you lost. I saw him have DBs lost, turned around. He’s this way, the defender’s the total opposite way. And it’s like, ‘how does he do this?’”

20 seasons in the NFL, 1,549 receptions, 22,895 receiving yards, 14 1,000-yard seasons, and 208 touchdowns – that’s the legacy Rice built on his technique and understanding of the game. Even in his rookie season, Rice flashed signs of greatness, averaging 18.9 yards per catch on 49 receptions. Alongside the 3 TDs he brought in as a rookie, he even rushed for a score. By the time he’d established himself as the best receiver in the league, he already had three Super Bowl rings and a Super Bowl MVP title to his name.

But instead of feeling like he could never compete with Rice, Terrell Owens became a sponge. Under the tutelage of Larry Kirksey – his WRs coach – Owens learnt from Rice, as well as JJ Stokes, a supreme receiver in his own right who joined the Niners a year before Owens.

“I would have been a fool not to take advantage of that,” Owens said. “And I obviously had two great coaches, and Larry Kirksey, who coached Brent Jones… Jerry Rice, John Taylor, Mike Sherrard…So, all these are like really good 49ers receivers. And then obviously you add JJ in the fold. So I had obviously JJ and Jerry to learn from, and I watched so much film to become the receiver that I became. So that’s what I said: I didn’t think that I could be who he was, and I had to put that in my head like, ‘You can’t be him,’ but I can be a version of him.”

That ‘version’ of Jerry Rice went on to dominate the league for 15 years, earning Canton immortality and etching his name in the San Francisco 49ers Hall of Fame. Despite all his accolades, Terrell Owens still played second fiddle to the man who set every single wide receiver benchmark in existence. After all this time, though, Owens still wears the mantle of #2 behind Jerry proudly.