Former Jets/Bucs/Cowboys/Panthers receiver Keyshawn Johnson had hoped to become a Tiki-style presence at ABC/ESPN, with a presence that extended beyond weekends during football season.

It hasn’t happened.

And so with Michael Strahan instantly occupying a higher television profile than Keyshawn enjoys, it makes sense that Keyshawn will do whatever he has to do to get his name back in circulation during the seven-months of the year where he is, but for the draft, irrelevant.

Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald recently noted that Keyshawn is still “seriously” considering a comeback, presumably to play for the Dolphins, who are led ultimately by Bill Parcells.

But why would Keyshawn be toying with the idea of giving up his chair at the grown-ups’ table in Bristol?  With guys like Mark Schlereth and Cris Carter and Shaun King and the rest of the cast of thousands surely pining for a shot at the prime NFL shows to which Keyshawn has been assigned, and with a flood of players graduating from the game every year in search of a money-for-nothing gig based on talking about football, those seats tend to get filled fairly quickly — and tend to stay filled even if their occupants aren’t very good (e.g., Emmitt).

As Keyshawn said last year, “I’m not going to be a guy who stays in the game a little bit too long.  Television is the right situation at the right time for me and my family.”  

Though Keyshawn might now be thinking about getting back into the game and, thereafter, working as a scout or an assistant coach, those jobs are real work, requiring far more time and paying far less money than the television thing.

As a result, we think that Keyshawn merely feels compelled to make noise from time to time in the offseason to remind us all that he’s still around, and perhaps to get the powers-that-be at ABC/ESPN to make him happy by finding some other ways that he can score a nice paycheck by talking, preferably about himself.