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- Apr 7, 2013
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By Bob Sturm 52m ago
Certainly, this is rock bottom. The Cowboys can’t go lower than this, right?
So much was expected from this game. It felt vital for simple morale purposes, after a week of challenges to your manhood and your makeup after a lifeless showing versus Buffalo when the whole world watched the Bills mop the field with your entire roster.
Surely, with a week of humiliation and calls for change, you would summon every ounce of your best you can find inside. You would respond with a steely resolve demonstrating what makes you fit to wear the uniform or run the team. If ever there was a circle-the-wagons moment in the 2019 season, it would have to be this Thursday night affair when the football universe is wondering what you are made of, right?
With observers yelling for change, the easiest answer is to summon your best fight against a team of equal mediocrity. Surely, against one of the worst offenses you play all year, you were not about to concede the most points of any road game all season and answer the challenges of two poor offensive showings in a row with a third that might have been even worse, right?
I resist saying any one moment in a disastrous season is “rock bottom” because I have learned over 22 years that it can always get worse – and because this team is still ridiculously in first place in their division – but last night in Chicago felt about as lifeless and hopeless as Dallas Cowboys football has felt in ages.
At one point about midway through the affair, the Cowboys strung together five offensive possessions that resulted in this: three-and-out, three-and-out, missed field goal, three-and-out, three-and-out. On the other side, four consecutive Bears possessions went touchdown-field goal-touchdown-touchdown. That’s from a team that simply doesn’t experience that much offensive success in several games, let alone a single hour. During that stretch, when the offense could not accomplish a single positive action and the defense could not muster the slightest resistance, many of us subconsciously and simultaneously channeled that cold night in November 2010 at Green Bay. For on that night, it appeared every last breath of life fell out of the Wade Phillips era, and the entire franchise collapsed to the dirt. The following morning, Phillips was fired. Was it all his fault? It honestly ceased to matter at that point. When your team you built and paid so much for can no longer offer the slightest resistance for weeks in a row, you know that you have reached the very bottom of the roller coaster, and it is time to do what has to be done.
That is where we are this morning. I see no logical reason to counter the simple belief that Jason Garrett must be fired today. Actually, the counter was to do it a week ago. There is simply no air left in the balloon. We have reached the part of the story when everyone knows what is around the next corner.
The coach knows he is gone. He understands the business and he understands his room. He has been in the NFL for three decades and is far more familiar with how this works than most of us could ever be. Coaches talk about the moment they realize they are a “dead man walking,” and then it becomes an exercise in simply carrying out your own role with dignity and class. No, he is not going to quit on his team, but he knows they stopped responding and he knows who will ultimately pay for that. Cats have nine lives, and this Cowboys coach had nine full seasons. We believe he just used up the last one.
The owner/general manager/circus ringmaster knows he is gone. This is the part of the season when we know the coach is gone because rumors have started to surface about the job-search feelers that inevitably get out when the Jones family does what they do in the manner they do it. This may not be a runway meeting at the Teterboro Airport in New Jersey like the one the Cowboys had in December of 2002 with Bill Parcells, but we shouldn’t rule that sort of thing out. Because there is always the chance for the long shot to occur in sports, we can only say we are 99 percent sure Jason Garrett has no further lifeline to his job, but at this point there is a greater chance that one of the two head coaches from Saturday’s Big 12 Championship Game in Cowboys Stadium is running the Cowboys sideline in 2020 than Garrett himself. I truly believe that.
We know how this part of the story goes because we have seen it so many times. The process has expired, and the clapping has fallen on deaf ears. We had some fun at various times in the last decade, but for the most part, it is more of the same short-term joy and long-term frustration since the day Jerry Jones decided he could no longer handle Jimmy Johnson taking too much of the credit and adoration from the masses for what was being built in Dallas. That dynasty is approaching ancient history, but it does seem like the line of demarcation for where this thing took its ultimate wrong turn.
The football world tuned in last night to see the Cowboys make one last heroic stand to fight for the legacy of the only coach almost the entire roster had ever played for in Dallas. Instead, by the early going in the second quarter, the Bears whipped the Cowboys in a fashion that probably surprised even them. Dallas looks imposing and continues to have the reputation of a stacked roster, but there was no fight left in them after their opening drive. Just like Thanksgiving, they entered a 60-minute contest with roughly eight minutes of energy.
From there, the number of broken tackles, dropped passes, missed blocks, untimely mistakes and just being flat-blown off the ball were all too many to count.
They look done. They look demoralized and exhausted. Drained and beaten. I realize every Sunday is a new adventure in the NFL, but I feel relatively confident you can stick a fork in this crew. They have been lit up by so many bad offenses and quarterbacks this season that it probably should stop surprising us when they shrink on yet another occasion.
What was the worst one? Sam Darnold’s career day or Josh Allen’s career day? Perhaps Mitch Trubisky’s career day? Or maybe it was when Kirk Cousins and Aaron Rodgers had monstrous games without the benefit of their top targets? It is difficult to gauge whether this defense has quit, because they have lost so many battles this season when they were trying. But when Trubisky passes for 244 yards and runs for 63 more on you, accounting for four touchdowns, that could very well be rock bottom.
The offense continues to be the author of the gaudy statistics that seem to signify very little. The raw yardage is nice, but the actual goal of this sport remains scoring more points than your opponent, and given that they haven’t outscored very many since mid-September, we stand less than impressed that they rolled up another 400-yard day that once again felt largely cosmetic after the opening drive. They were pummeled on offense for the first three quarters, and Trubisky had already put 31 on them by the time they finally got their footing. You could argue the Bears dropped their defensive intensity in garbage time.
This whole thing was lifeless, and the body language police had many arrests to make last night. They allowed themselves to fall deeper into the zombie-like general malaise that simply doesn’t get any results in this league. It is a game of emotion and passion, and when you try to play against desperate teams that have not been emotionally defeated, you can get embarrassed. Which definitely happened last night.
Last week, Jerry Jones stood in the Cowboys locker room and talked to the huddled media about why he won’t fire his coach, suggesting in some sort of ridiculous logic that, if you do that, you give up on any dreams of salvaging 2019.
As we sit here this morning, I would argue just the opposite. I think if you have even the slightest hope of making sure these last three games are not a complete carbon copy of the previous two in terms of lifelessness from a team that has very little fight left to give (evidently), you must fire Garrett immediately – if not sooner. We were there in 2010. We know what a team looks like that has nothing left for the coach hanging by a thread. You can say they have given up on him or tuned him out or just can’t raise their intensity until the owner sorts out this mess he insisted on creating. But whatever the reason, you simply cannot proceed as it currently stands. This is over. This is done.
The only way you inject some life into the present tense is to follow the recipe of addition by subtraction. You extract Jason Garrett from this locker room and put the rest of the organization on notice that you have turned the page. Now, this is just temporary, because finding the right man for the next five years should not be done on a flight back from Chicago in the middle of the night. But we do know one thing: The expiration date on this present era has been reached. This day is over. It was a good run, but it also probably lasted at least three years too long. If the only way to trigger a new and temporary energy in the room is to flush the old out, then commence flushing.
The Joneses clearly do not wish to do this. They want to finish the story on a proper schedule. They want to schedule their clandestine meetings with potential “big splash” candidates on their time without interrupting their holiday party schedule and without the chaos that a coaching change in Week 14 can cause.
Too bad. After that disaster last night, the only way out of this mess is exactly the opposite of what Jerry evidently thinks. The team showed you against Buffalo and against Chicago that they can’t even keep games competitive under their soon-to-be-ex coach, let alone win them. If Philadelphia is so comically inept as well that they have kept the Cowboys in first place, fine. That shouldn’t make you lose sight of the utter disaster that this particular squad has made out of 2019.
Is there time to salvage this season? Let’s be honest: probably not. The best you can hope for is being a pretty big underdog at home against someone like San Francisco or Seattle after losing nine of your last 13 games or so. The worst-case scenario is being humiliated before Christmas in Philadelphia by yet another team that can’t beat anyone until they play your lifeless side. It won’t be the first time this year that has happened. Not by a long stretch.
Either way, Jason Garrett appears to have demonstrated he is completely out of answers. He is probably frustrated by the constant undercutting of the Jones family at this point and may actually look forward to a fresh start somewhere new, but it is hard to get too sympathetic on that front given the Jones family has made him rich beyond his dreams and kept him employed for a decade without January accomplishments.
Both sides know this era is over. Turn the page. The interim coach is not the priority here. Rod Marinelli, Kris Richard, Will McClay, Jon Kitna – it simply doesn’t matter. The message and the jolt are all that matters now. None of the interim names are serious candidates to be the next head coach, in my estimation, but all of them are familiar enough with this mess to be able to get them through the next month. This, as I said, is addition by subtraction now.
This sinking ship needs a jolt and it needs to happen today. What has transpired in the last eight days screams “rock bottom” and “grim reality” to all who will listen.
Of course, that probably matters little to those in the owner’s box, who refuse to deviate from their perfect plan, as usual.
Certainly, this is rock bottom. The Cowboys can’t go lower than this, right?
So much was expected from this game. It felt vital for simple morale purposes, after a week of challenges to your manhood and your makeup after a lifeless showing versus Buffalo when the whole world watched the Bills mop the field with your entire roster.
Surely, with a week of humiliation and calls for change, you would summon every ounce of your best you can find inside. You would respond with a steely resolve demonstrating what makes you fit to wear the uniform or run the team. If ever there was a circle-the-wagons moment in the 2019 season, it would have to be this Thursday night affair when the football universe is wondering what you are made of, right?
With observers yelling for change, the easiest answer is to summon your best fight against a team of equal mediocrity. Surely, against one of the worst offenses you play all year, you were not about to concede the most points of any road game all season and answer the challenges of two poor offensive showings in a row with a third that might have been even worse, right?
I resist saying any one moment in a disastrous season is “rock bottom” because I have learned over 22 years that it can always get worse – and because this team is still ridiculously in first place in their division – but last night in Chicago felt about as lifeless and hopeless as Dallas Cowboys football has felt in ages.
At one point about midway through the affair, the Cowboys strung together five offensive possessions that resulted in this: three-and-out, three-and-out, missed field goal, three-and-out, three-and-out. On the other side, four consecutive Bears possessions went touchdown-field goal-touchdown-touchdown. That’s from a team that simply doesn’t experience that much offensive success in several games, let alone a single hour. During that stretch, when the offense could not accomplish a single positive action and the defense could not muster the slightest resistance, many of us subconsciously and simultaneously channeled that cold night in November 2010 at Green Bay. For on that night, it appeared every last breath of life fell out of the Wade Phillips era, and the entire franchise collapsed to the dirt. The following morning, Phillips was fired. Was it all his fault? It honestly ceased to matter at that point. When your team you built and paid so much for can no longer offer the slightest resistance for weeks in a row, you know that you have reached the very bottom of the roller coaster, and it is time to do what has to be done.
That is where we are this morning. I see no logical reason to counter the simple belief that Jason Garrett must be fired today. Actually, the counter was to do it a week ago. There is simply no air left in the balloon. We have reached the part of the story when everyone knows what is around the next corner.
The coach knows he is gone. He understands the business and he understands his room. He has been in the NFL for three decades and is far more familiar with how this works than most of us could ever be. Coaches talk about the moment they realize they are a “dead man walking,” and then it becomes an exercise in simply carrying out your own role with dignity and class. No, he is not going to quit on his team, but he knows they stopped responding and he knows who will ultimately pay for that. Cats have nine lives, and this Cowboys coach had nine full seasons. We believe he just used up the last one.
The owner/general manager/circus ringmaster knows he is gone. This is the part of the season when we know the coach is gone because rumors have started to surface about the job-search feelers that inevitably get out when the Jones family does what they do in the manner they do it. This may not be a runway meeting at the Teterboro Airport in New Jersey like the one the Cowboys had in December of 2002 with Bill Parcells, but we shouldn’t rule that sort of thing out. Because there is always the chance for the long shot to occur in sports, we can only say we are 99 percent sure Jason Garrett has no further lifeline to his job, but at this point there is a greater chance that one of the two head coaches from Saturday’s Big 12 Championship Game in Cowboys Stadium is running the Cowboys sideline in 2020 than Garrett himself. I truly believe that.
We know how this part of the story goes because we have seen it so many times. The process has expired, and the clapping has fallen on deaf ears. We had some fun at various times in the last decade, but for the most part, it is more of the same short-term joy and long-term frustration since the day Jerry Jones decided he could no longer handle Jimmy Johnson taking too much of the credit and adoration from the masses for what was being built in Dallas. That dynasty is approaching ancient history, but it does seem like the line of demarcation for where this thing took its ultimate wrong turn.
The football world tuned in last night to see the Cowboys make one last heroic stand to fight for the legacy of the only coach almost the entire roster had ever played for in Dallas. Instead, by the early going in the second quarter, the Bears whipped the Cowboys in a fashion that probably surprised even them. Dallas looks imposing and continues to have the reputation of a stacked roster, but there was no fight left in them after their opening drive. Just like Thanksgiving, they entered a 60-minute contest with roughly eight minutes of energy.
From there, the number of broken tackles, dropped passes, missed blocks, untimely mistakes and just being flat-blown off the ball were all too many to count.
They look done. They look demoralized and exhausted. Drained and beaten. I realize every Sunday is a new adventure in the NFL, but I feel relatively confident you can stick a fork in this crew. They have been lit up by so many bad offenses and quarterbacks this season that it probably should stop surprising us when they shrink on yet another occasion.
What was the worst one? Sam Darnold’s career day or Josh Allen’s career day? Perhaps Mitch Trubisky’s career day? Or maybe it was when Kirk Cousins and Aaron Rodgers had monstrous games without the benefit of their top targets? It is difficult to gauge whether this defense has quit, because they have lost so many battles this season when they were trying. But when Trubisky passes for 244 yards and runs for 63 more on you, accounting for four touchdowns, that could very well be rock bottom.
The offense continues to be the author of the gaudy statistics that seem to signify very little. The raw yardage is nice, but the actual goal of this sport remains scoring more points than your opponent, and given that they haven’t outscored very many since mid-September, we stand less than impressed that they rolled up another 400-yard day that once again felt largely cosmetic after the opening drive. They were pummeled on offense for the first three quarters, and Trubisky had already put 31 on them by the time they finally got their footing. You could argue the Bears dropped their defensive intensity in garbage time.
This whole thing was lifeless, and the body language police had many arrests to make last night. They allowed themselves to fall deeper into the zombie-like general malaise that simply doesn’t get any results in this league. It is a game of emotion and passion, and when you try to play against desperate teams that have not been emotionally defeated, you can get embarrassed. Which definitely happened last night.
Last week, Jerry Jones stood in the Cowboys locker room and talked to the huddled media about why he won’t fire his coach, suggesting in some sort of ridiculous logic that, if you do that, you give up on any dreams of salvaging 2019.
As we sit here this morning, I would argue just the opposite. I think if you have even the slightest hope of making sure these last three games are not a complete carbon copy of the previous two in terms of lifelessness from a team that has very little fight left to give (evidently), you must fire Garrett immediately – if not sooner. We were there in 2010. We know what a team looks like that has nothing left for the coach hanging by a thread. You can say they have given up on him or tuned him out or just can’t raise their intensity until the owner sorts out this mess he insisted on creating. But whatever the reason, you simply cannot proceed as it currently stands. This is over. This is done.
The only way you inject some life into the present tense is to follow the recipe of addition by subtraction. You extract Jason Garrett from this locker room and put the rest of the organization on notice that you have turned the page. Now, this is just temporary, because finding the right man for the next five years should not be done on a flight back from Chicago in the middle of the night. But we do know one thing: The expiration date on this present era has been reached. This day is over. It was a good run, but it also probably lasted at least three years too long. If the only way to trigger a new and temporary energy in the room is to flush the old out, then commence flushing.
The Joneses clearly do not wish to do this. They want to finish the story on a proper schedule. They want to schedule their clandestine meetings with potential “big splash” candidates on their time without interrupting their holiday party schedule and without the chaos that a coaching change in Week 14 can cause.
Too bad. After that disaster last night, the only way out of this mess is exactly the opposite of what Jerry evidently thinks. The team showed you against Buffalo and against Chicago that they can’t even keep games competitive under their soon-to-be-ex coach, let alone win them. If Philadelphia is so comically inept as well that they have kept the Cowboys in first place, fine. That shouldn’t make you lose sight of the utter disaster that this particular squad has made out of 2019.
Is there time to salvage this season? Let’s be honest: probably not. The best you can hope for is being a pretty big underdog at home against someone like San Francisco or Seattle after losing nine of your last 13 games or so. The worst-case scenario is being humiliated before Christmas in Philadelphia by yet another team that can’t beat anyone until they play your lifeless side. It won’t be the first time this year that has happened. Not by a long stretch.
Either way, Jason Garrett appears to have demonstrated he is completely out of answers. He is probably frustrated by the constant undercutting of the Jones family at this point and may actually look forward to a fresh start somewhere new, but it is hard to get too sympathetic on that front given the Jones family has made him rich beyond his dreams and kept him employed for a decade without January accomplishments.
Both sides know this era is over. Turn the page. The interim coach is not the priority here. Rod Marinelli, Kris Richard, Will McClay, Jon Kitna – it simply doesn’t matter. The message and the jolt are all that matters now. None of the interim names are serious candidates to be the next head coach, in my estimation, but all of them are familiar enough with this mess to be able to get them through the next month. This, as I said, is addition by subtraction now.
This sinking ship needs a jolt and it needs to happen today. What has transpired in the last eight days screams “rock bottom” and “grim reality” to all who will listen.
Of course, that probably matters little to those in the owner’s box, who refuse to deviate from their perfect plan, as usual.