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Win Doesn’t End Cowboys’ Troubles
By JUDY BATTISTA
There was a moment late in the Dallas Cowboys’ rebirth against the Giants on Sunday when Jason Garrett was presented with another teaching moment in what is going to be two months of them. 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.
“It’s O.K., men,” Garrett, Dallas’s interim coach, told his players as they came off the field. “It’s O.K.”
But is everything really O.K.? For a day, it was. The Cowboys thrashed the Giants, 33-20, and while they are not going to the playoffs, 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 a little effort, this team was capable of competing, if not winning on the “everything is bigger in Texas” scale Jerry Jones sells like a carnival barker.
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 against the Giants, nor the team that embarrassed itself in the first half of the season.
Jones assembled a team that gave up quickly, on itself and on Phillips, 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. The Cowboys, as everyone suspected, have talent. It’s too late for them to play in the Super Bowl at home. So it’s time to look at what they have to do to give themselves a shot at the Super Bowls in Indianapolis or New Orleans.
“It’s mind-blowing that this team was 1-7,” Troy Aikman, the Fox analyst and former Cowboys quarterback, said. “They’re not that far off.”
Before Sunday’s game, Aikman did not like the chances of Garrett’s keeping his job in the long term. Unless the Cowboys win out, Garrett will be a tough sell to fans — not a small consideration, considering Jones has to be worried about selling tickets in his billion-dollar football pleasure palace. The fans will view him as a continuation of a failed era. Garrett ignited something with a no-nonsense style, but he will have to prove that he is not only capable of pushing players into uncomfortable places, but also pushing back at Jones.
“What has been said here since Jimmy Johnson departed is that Jerry, the owner, needs to fire Jerry, the general manager,” Aikman said. “That’s a little nauseating to hear because it’s not going to happen. When they’ve won, they had a head coach, Jimmy or Bill Parcells, that the players knew was in charge. I knew I better please Jimmy or there would be hell to pay. When you’ve had success with a certain style of coach, why do you go away from it? In the history of football, you start thinking of great coaches, what was their demeanor? They were all pretty tough individuals, held people accountable, a little gruff.”
Gil Brandt, the former Cowboys personnel executive who left after Jones bought the team and who continues to analyze the league for NFL.com, anticipated the improved play of the defense with Paul Pasqualoni in charge last week. The defense had not changed enough from last year to keep opponents off balance, a necessity in a league in which tape is analyzed nearly instantly and teams adjust from week to week. One example of Pasqualoni’s influence: the run defense gave up nearly 100 fewer yards to the Giants on Sunday than it did only three weeks ago. The Giants’ patchwork offensive line undoubtedly had something to do with that, but the Cowboys were noticeably more aggressive than they were in the teams’ first game.
Brandt pointed to how many young players were active for the Patriots (7-2) as an example of where the Cowboys were failing. The Patriots had four rookies in the defensive starting lineup Sunday. The Cowboys recently released their top pick from the 2009 draft, linebacker Jason Williams, the third member of that class released in the span of a month. That leaves the Cowboys’ perilously thin and facing an even more uncertain future.
“There’s a lot of people on this team that are getting near the wall — Witten, Bradie James — those guys are getting to where we historically don’t get any better, they usually fall down,” Brandt said.
Maybe Garrett will prove everyone wrong. Maybe he is the demanding coach the Cowboys need, with the advantage that he already knows the shortcomings of his personnel. In New Jersey on Sunday night, Jones sounded chastened and cautious, the ebullience of one victory offering little immediate consolation for a season in ruins.
“I hope it’s a good feeling for our fans,” he said
Sure, it was. But Jones knows this, too: one win doesn’t make everything O.K.
