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Dallas Cowboys not out of the woods just yet
November 15th, 2010
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)
The Dallas Cowboys scored strongly against the Giants with an ending score of 33-20 over the weekend - but it doesn't mean the team can rest on its laurels just yet. David Buehler's field goal attempt sailed wide with 5 minutes 45 seconds remaining, and the "Cowboys' tentative steps back from the precipice and toward, well, mediocrity threatened to end up in a face plant," Judy Battista of the New York Times wrote.
LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The Dallas Cowboys scored strongly against the Giants with an ending score of 33-20 over the weekend - but it doesn't mean the team can rest on its laurels just yet. David Buehler's field goal attempt sailed wide with 5 minutes 45 seconds remaining, and the "Cowboys' tentative steps back from the precipice and toward, well, mediocrity threatened to end up in a face plant," Judy Battista of the New York Times wrote.
Jerry Jones, the Cowboys' owner fired his coach midseason for the first time since he bought the team in 1989. He will need to decide who he wants on his sideline next season. "It's O.K., men," Jason Garrett, Dallas's interim coach, told his players as they came off the field. "It's O.K."
"But is everything really O.K.?" Battista writes. "For a day, it was. The Cowboys thrashed the Giants, 33-20, and while they are not going to the playoffs this season, they staved off the humiliation of a death spiral into December. The Cowboys played well at times and, more to the point, they played hard. The flat line of the first eight games was gone. But that merely proved something that watchers had suspected all along: with just a little effort, this team was capable of competing, if not winning on the 'everything is bigger in Texas' scale," Battista writes.
"Can a team really be O.K. when all it took was firing the nice guy coach and being made to put on pads on a Wednesday and a suit jacket on the team plane? Not likely. Coaching changes often generate a little sizzle, as the shake-up in the meeting rooms at least jars awake the players who were sleepwalking through tackles. But eventually the team's essential nature reveals itself again, which is why, as The Dallas Morning News noted, of the 72 interim coaches hired in the N.F.L. since 1960, 56 finished with a losing record.
"When the layers are peeled back on the Cowboys - after Detroit on Sunday, they have New Orleans, Indianapolis and Philadelphia (twice) remaining on the schedule - they are likely to look not entirely like the team that prevailed on Sunday, nor the team that embarrassed itself in the first half of the season. They will look like something that's a little harder to fix: something in the middle, something that needs repairs on the offensive line, a playmaking safety and a psychological overhaul.
"Those underlying issues will require decisions that can only be made after long reflection and roster analysis, and perhaps some introspection by Jerry Jones. He assembled a team that gave up quickly, on itself and its coach, displaying a shocking lack of professionalism and pride for at least a month, only to turn on its passion as if it were a faucet," Battista says.