Less than four hours after Antonio Bryant departed from Paul Brown Stadium, the public courtship nearly five weeks in the making officially began when Terrell Owens landed at Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport.

Owens, who arrived from Los Angeles, had dinner with the coaching staff tonight and will visit the Bengals offices tomorrow.

Said Owens after arriving: “There’s always been the speculation and perception out there (about coming to Cincinnati) and Chad kick started it and lobbied to have me here as a teammate and I welcome it with open arms.”

Ochocinco started the T.O. talk during Super Bowl week in Miami. As receivers started to come off the market when free agency began last Friday, Owens started to look like a more viable option.

Bryant, who celebrated his 29th birthday on Tuesday, left town Tuesday afternoon without a contract. He is still considered to be the number one option but will be visiting other teams this week.

Calls to his agent Lamont Smith were not returned.

Enter Owens who had only 55 receptions for 829 yards and five touchdowns last season in Buffalo.

“By my standards I didn’t have a great year. Could I have done better? Yes,” Owens said. “A lot of the offense, everyone’s numbers were down across the board. The only person I feel had a great year was Fred Jackson. Considering the opportunities I had and I got my season was OK.”

While his production was the lowest in a full season since his second season in the league in 1997 with San Francisco, the 15-year veteran can give the Bengals a deep threat that they don’t have right now. Last year, Owens had 10 receptions of 25 yards or more including five that went for over 40. The Bengals as a team had 12 and five respectively.

No matter who becomes the number two receiver behind Ochocinco, Carson Palmer is ready to work with whoever comes to Cincinnati and said on Monday that he was eagerly watching the developments.

“I paid attention to some of the things that happened in the playoffs and leading up to the playoffs,” Owens said. “Chad and I both can alleviate a lot of pressure off each other and we can make Carson’s job a lot easier.

“I think the excitement speaks for itself. You think about it and what we both can do on the football field together, obviously defenses are going to have to go his way or my way.”

While Owens has had run-ins with some of his former quarterbacks – Jeff Garcia and Donovan McNabb come to mind – the 15-year veteran said he would love to have the opportunity to work with Palmer.

Said Owens of Palmer: “I think Carson is one of those underrated quarterbacks. His body of work speaks for itself. Obviously I also relish the moment I can play with a quarterback with the capability and skill set of Carson’s. If this is it I’m looking forward to the opportunity.”

Owens said that the purpose of the visit is to sit down with Marvin Lewis and the rest of the coaching staff and see where he would fit. For those who wonder how Ochocinco and Owens would be able to coexist in an offense that has had the tendency to sputter the last two years, Owens brought up his relationship and how he worked with Hall of Famer Jerry Rice in San Francisco as proof that things can work.

“For everyone that speculates on the amount of balls going my way or Chad’s way, I’ve played with a great receivers. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work with us on the same field. Right now this is my first stop and see how it goes from there.”

Owens thinks he can play another two or three years but that the length of the contract would be up to the organization and his agent, Drew Rosenhaus.

As for Ochocinco, the two saw each other on Saturday in Los Angeles and acknowledged that the campaign work is done.

Said Owens of Ochocinco: “His work is already done. He put the bug out there. So right now we have to solidify some things. Hopefully the dinner is good. Chad realizes in the playoffs they may have been one or two players from getting to the big show so obviously he’s a fan of my abilities.”

While Antonio Bryant is still inside One Paul Brown Stadium, Terrell Owens’ visit to the Bengals will not happen until tomorrow.

Owens is scheduled to arrive in Cincinnati tonight and will visit with the team tomorrow. Bryant though is still believed to be the first choice.

During an interview earlier today with The Enquirer’s John Kiesewetter, Chad Ochocinco was asked if there was room for both Bryant and Owens in Cincinnati.

“Why wouldn’t there be? I think this is the year of no salarly cap, if I’m correct. Hey, why wouldn’t there be?,” said Ochocinco, who was also talking about his upcoming appearance on Dancing With The Stars. “Let’s load it up, you know! We can get back to that firepower offense we were back in ‘05 and ‘06, when we were throwing it all over the place. Even though that’s not the makeup of our team right now, I think it can help. Period.”

However when asked if he had to choose which one, Ochocinco said: “I mean, it’s whatever. Both of them can help us.”

Bryant is also scheduled to have a visit with the Washington Redskins later this week.

According to Mayor Michael B. Coleman, a deal to stabilize the Blue Jackets -- financially, at least -- is near.

And it sounds like public ownership of Nationwide Arena will be part of the plan.

According to this report from WOSU News, Coleman told "All Sides With Ann Fisher" this morning that the Franklin County Convention Facilities Authority and the Schottenstein Center's Value City Arena likely would be involved with managing Nationwide Arena.

The Blue Jackets' $5 million annual rent for the arena and the team's $4 million annual loss running it are financial obstacles that jeopardize the future of Columbus' NHL franchise, according to a Columbus Chamber report issued last fall.

John Rosenberger, the retired Downtown development official hired to broker a deal among all the players, told us this afternoon that he didn't want to join the mayor in putting even a vague timeline on things.

He said the convention authority long has been considered a likely part of the answer, and public ownership of the arena would make the publicly owned Schot an obvious partner.

It’s hard enough to try to rebuild a program from scratch in the toughest basketball conference in the country, but it turns out that Mick Cronin has had to do it with far fewer resources than most of his fellow Big East coaches have at their disposal.

There’s a story in the New York Times today about how the schools that spend the most money on their basketball programs tend to have the most success in the Big East. The story cites Dept. of Education figures on what each Big East school spent on basketball from July 2008 to June 2009. Among the schools that field teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision, UC is seventh among nine (that includes Notre Dame), spending $4,011,357. Only Rutgers and South Florida spent less.

Louisville, at $8,625,245, spent the most among the FBS schools, followed by Syracuse, UConn, West Virginia, Pitt, Notre Dame and then UC.

But it’s Marquette – a non-football school – that spent the most. The Golden Eagles spent $10,306,548 on basketball during that period. Among all 16 schools, UC is 13th. Only Rutgers, DePaul and South Florida spent less.

Sometimes it seems to me that whenever things go wrong in college teaching, the first impulse of the professor is to blame the students. They aren’t prepared for class. They don’t want to grapple with the hard concepts. They don’t want to read what I assign. They do all their work at the last minute.

And now, apparently, laptop computers in class have caused them to stop paying attention.

We’ve all seen it. The student with a laptop who has clearly checked out of lecture. Is he reading his email? Is she chatting with a friend? Is he playing World of Warcraft? And then there are the other students peering covertly or openly at the open screen.

I’m sorry to report that laptops aren’t the problem, nor are students. As Pogo said so many years ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I’m still not sure how it is that people with advanced degrees that require them to develop sophisticated research skills can so casually ignore mountains of research by serious cognitive scientists that demonstrates unequivocally that lecturing is one of the worst forms of teaching (if the quality of teaching is measured by learning).

A simple summary of that research — and I’ve read a lot of it lately — could be called the 20/20 rule. Study after study shows that when students are lectured at their attention drifts very rapidly and that 20 minutes is about all their brains can tolerate. After 20 minutes, these studies show that the majority of students are somewhere else, with our without the aid of a laptop. And study after study shows that students (even the brightest and most attentive) retain, on average, about 20% of what is told to them in lecture. For a good summary of this research, see Lion F. Gardiner, “Why We Must Change: The Research Evidence,” Thought & Action 14/1 (1998): 71-88.

So instead of blaming our students for wandering away on their laptops, I think it’s time we looked a little more closely in the mirror and asked ourselves why they wander off. That, of course, would require us to admit that too often we (me included more than I’d care to admit) follow the path of least resistance and stand at the front of the room and talk while they take notes. Like any addiction, lecturing is a hard habit to break. If it were easy to stop, I’d have junked all of my lectures by now instead of something like two-thirds. But I’m getting there.

Some like to argue that what I’ve just pointed out is rooted in idealism that can’t be matched by the practicalities of teaching to large classes. Nice try, I say, because plenty of talented educators have figured out how to engage students in active learning even in large lecture halls. Perhaps the best example I know of is Dennis Jacobs, a professor of Chemistry at Notre Dame, whose work on active learning in large lecture classes has earned him many awards, not the least of which is the CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year award. If Dennis can do it in introductory Chemistry, I guess I don’t understand why we can’t do it in the freshman History survey.

So let’s take a step back and stop blaming our students (and their laptops). Doing so will force us to think more carefully about our own teaching practice and how we (as opposed to they) might improve.