Wednesday, October 13, 2010

The Cowboys Have to Prove They Aren't a Bad Team

Let me start by prefacing what I am about to say with a few remarks. I have not given up on the team. I still believe the Cowboys can achieve every goal they had set before the game started this year. Every game remaining on the schedule is a winnable game.

With that said, the Cowboys are not a good team right now. In fact they aren't even an average team right now. They are flat out bad. They put up great offensive numbers but they don't score enough points off of all the yards they gain. The defense hasn't been anything to brag about all year. And the special teams have been bad in nearly every game.

They are a 1-3 team. It is really embarrassing to even admit that they have such a terrible record. You can search high and low for answers but the problems of the Dallas Cowboys are a complicated riddle. Here is a brief list of what ails the team: penalties, turnovers by the offense, lack of turnovers forced by the defense, poor tackling, missed field goals, poor kick coverage, big plays allowed by the defense, poor pass protection by the offensive line, missed throws by the quarterback, dropped passes and inconsistent results in the running game. And I could keep going.

There is no way I can sit here and say the Cowboys are really close to being a good team right now. There are way too many problems to correct. They are going to have to improve in every category if they expect to not only win one game but win several games in a row to claw their way back into the NFC playoff picture.

I don't care what anyone wants to say about the Cowboys right now. They do have talent on the roster. That is no mirage. But they don't play as a cohesive unit and they don't fire on all cylinders with any consistency. Until that changes the Cowboys are just a collection of talented players. Look at the players individually and most of them look very good, but the performance of the team is currently less than the sum of the individual talent on the roster.

I have reached the point that I have lowered my expectations for the Cowboys. They are going to have to prove to me that they are a good team. Obviously they haven't been a good team up to this point, but Sunday can be the start of a turnaround.

One win won't convince me that the Cowboys have cleaned up their act. I was fooled by one decent performance in the Houston game and then felt like a sucker watching the game last week against the Titans. It is going to take 3 or 4 good team performances in a row before I start to believe all of the hype that surrounded this team heading into the season.

The Cowboys can't prove they've turned it all around against the Vikings. But they can begin to right the ship. I am a firm believer in the idea that winning is a habit just like losing can become a habit. The Cowboys are in danger of becoming habitual losers this season. The more they lose games the easier it becomes to accept those losses. I think the Cowboys have enough backbone to refuse to go down that losing road. I hope I'm not fooling myself again.

2 comments:

  1. The thing is that any team in the NFL can go on the road and suffer through crowd noise and get several penalties and even lose the turn over battle. But the Titan game was NOT on the road in a hostile environment, and that is really what infuriates me. You should be able to execute with few penalties and even few turnovers at home. That is the problem with this team. Too many penalties and turnovers, period. But the sad thing is that these have been problems for the Cowboys for that past several years, even when Parcells was here. I have no idea what they're going to do to fix it, but if they don't it's going to be a long year for us Cowboy faithfull.
    Goat

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  2. This Cowboys team (like all of Wade Phillips teams) has no guts. They are apparently too busy reading their own press as to how good they "should" be. Wade Phillips is one sorry excuse for a head coach, but in reality, he is exactly what Jerry Jones is looking for.....a puppet yes man, who will cave in to any "suggestions" from the owner/GM/defacto head coach. Wade could be a decent defense coordinator, but a head coach he is not. He lets players off too easily in situations where heads should roll. He doesn't even mind 12 penalties for 133 yards. The penalty numbers don't even begin to tell the story of how many Cowboy drives were killed by them, or how many Titan drives were extended by them. If it were a one week abberation, it could be dismissed. But it is not a one week problem. It is a week in week out situation, and has been since Wade took over. His teams are undisciplined, and seem to play with very little sense of urgency. They will almost always find a way to lose games, and rarely find a way to win one. These are ALL marks of a poorly coached football team. I was going to go to the Vikes-Boys game this weekend, but decent seats are $200+, and I can tell you this: This team has not earned MY money, so I'll watch the game from my couch, until I can't stand watching the Cowboys underachieve anymore, then I'll find something better to do with my time.

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