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Worse train wreck right now: Cowboys or Redskins?

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Uncle Frosty, Dec 15, 2013.

  1. Morris816

    Morris816 Member

    With Jones, I'm not certain if a series of losing seasons would case him to rethink his strategy. He's pretty much convinced himself that his ability to promote a team translates into knowing more about everything else that leads to a successful team.

    And in his case, it's probably going to be tougher to pry that control away from him than it was with Al Davis, even though Davis could correctly point out that he had many seasons in which he showed he could do more than just promote a team well.

    If anything, Davis' issues were his unwillingness to change his strategies given how the game was evolving. With Jones, he just doesn't understand enough about evaluating talent to begin with.
     
  2. Mizzougrad96

    Mizzougrad96 Active Member

    Jones doesn't realize that he is the biggest road block from Dallas being a top team again.

    If he steps back and they start winning, everybody starts pointing out the reason why and he would not be able to handle that.
     
  3. Baron Scicluna

    Baron Scicluna Well-Known Member

    I always found it funny whenever Jerry would come down to the sidelines when the Cowboys were losing a game. Like the players are suddenly going to get inspired by seeing the owner standing next to them.
     
  4. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    In my line of work they call that a local optimum ... relative to neighboring solutions, the current solution is best, even though it's not the absolute best solution. Getting better isn't guaranteed even though, at least in the short term, getting worse is almost a given.

    And that stretch of quasi-breakeven seasons is why I disagree with those who say that Jones is a terrible GM. You can't be a terrible GM if your team is consistently in the neighborhood of 0.500. On the other hand, you certainly can't feel that you're a particularly good GM if 0.500's the best you can do (and the evidence mounts that that is the case).
     
  5. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    They are only competing now, even seven years later, because of what Parcells left there. As those guys leave and it becomes a team completely in Jerry's image, they will fall to the absolute dregs unless he does get smart. Take Romo, Ware, Witten and a few others off that team and see what you're left with. I don't think there is another team in the league that relies as much on players who were with them before 2007.
     
  6. Mark2010

    Mark2010 Active Member

    Well, that's the thing. Jones believes the team is just a couple of breaks and a couple of plays from being in the Super Bowl. And with the way the NFL playoffs are set up, I suppose that's possible. But it would be sort of a fluke if it happened.
     
  7. joe king

    joe king Active Member

    Here's the deal with that. After three consecutive 5-11 seasons from 2000-02, Jerry did rethink his strategy. He fired yes-man Dave Campo and hired Bill Parcells.

    After four seasons, Parcells not only didn't return the Cowboys to the Super Bowl, he really didn't do any better than the puppet before Campo, Chan Gailey -- 34-30 regular season, two playoff appearances with no wins vs. Gailey's 18-14 with two winless playoff appearances in two seasons.

    So when Jerry parted ways with Parcells, he declared it a failed experiment. Now, no matter what happens, Jerry tells himself -- and I think he's actually said this publicly -- I tried it your way and it didn't work, so I'm going to do it my way.

    It took an utter collapse and the team quitting on the coach for him to fire Phillips. I truly believe it will take a similar collapse for Jerry to give up on his football son, Garrett.

    I have a prediction: If Dallas loses the last game of the season to finish 8-8 and out of the playoffs again, Jerry will keep Garrett and at the press conference to announce he'll be back, Jerry will invoke the name of Tom Landry, as in, Landry began his career with five losing seasons and the team stuck with him, and look how that turned out. Jerry either truly believes or is trying to convince himself that in Garrett he has discovered the next great coach.

    Oh, yeah, and he'll point out that "we're right where we want to be," playing for a chance to get to the playoffs in the final week, and he'll talk about how close the team is to being a Super Bowl contender.
     
  8. BTExpress

    BTExpress Well-Known Member

    Most of the time that would be true.

    But for franchises that pride themselves on being the face of their sport (think Lakers, Yankees, etc.) with rich owners not afraid to throw their wallets around and with all the trappings that go along with it to make it easier to land top free agents (Lakers or Cavaliers? Hmmmm . . . ), then .500 over the long haul is simply a failure.
     
  9. doctorquant

    doctorquant Well-Known Member

    Oh, the hiring of Parcells wasn't remotely an experiment, and it certainly wasn't a failure. Jones hired Parcells to make sure he (Jones) got his stadium. Worked out fabulously.
     
  10. Football_Bat

    Football_Bat Well-Known Member

    The Cowboys are about to pay the piper with the salary cap. Jerry has restructured so many deals and pushed so much dead money down the road that when they inevitably hit the wall and all that dead cap space comes due, it's going to be ugly.

    But the organization is pretty damn good at scouting loading dock all-stars, so they'll continue to bump along with Jerry at the reins. If they were as good on draft day as they were with undrafted free agents, they'd be contending for home field every year.
     
  11. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    This is quite good and extremely painful for anyone with a rooting interest in the Redskins ... Mike Tanier's All-Snyder team, of "the Snyderest of the Snyder acquisitions: the overpriced and over-the-hill, the poor fits with poor attitudes, the stones that other builders rejected which became the cornerstones of a decade-plus of expensive, noisy futility."

    http://miketanier.sportsonearthblog.com/the-all-snyder-team/

    James Thrash, Bruce Smith, Jeremiah Trotter ... and Jeff George can't even make first string.
     
  12. Morris816

    Morris816 Member

    RE: Tanier's article, Jason Taylor was mentioned in the comments.

    How worthy of a mention would Adam Carriker be?
     
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