I posted this last year:
Preseason:
Bill Parcells quits after trying to strong arm Jerry into paying him more and we hire Wade Phillips. Jerry had already hired Jason Garrett as the OC, so it seemed likely we were getting a defensive minded head coach to take over. This was an odd move, as usually the HC picks his own staff.
Season
We got the AFC East and NFC North that year, which ended up being one of the easiest schedules in the league. The AFC East, was absolutely terrible, with the exception of New England.
We opened the season in a shoot out against the Giants on SNF. I remember the game vividly. I was excited to see the new "attacking" style defense of Wade Phillips, since we heard so many complaints about how vanilla the Parcells 3-4 was. It was one of the most exciting regular season games I have ever watched. After that game, we knew Romo was the real deal.
After that game, we had a bunch of cupcake games. The Bears were defending NFC champs, but they weren't very good. The Rams, Dolphins, Bills were the worst teams in the league, and the Vikings were mediocre.
In hindsight, we beat up on a bunch of bad teams, which allowed some individual players to play at a level that was not representative of their true potential.
Pro Bowl Players
This is where the "talented roster" talk started to happen. It seems like commonplace now, but in 2006, no one was praising the talent that is on this team. Now, every year, we hear the pundits claiming the Cowboys have enough talent to win the Super Bowl, but it just isn't true.
Romo
MBIII
TO
Witten
Flozell
Davis
Gurode
Ware
Ellis
Newman
Hamlin
Roy Williams
Folk
What is interesting is that Gurode was terrible this year at snapping. He was a decent interior blocker, but he had a ton of bad snaps, some of which were comical, like against the Rams.
It would be proven in the next year that a large majority of these guys were flukes who padded their stats by playing terrible teams.
2008 Season
Jerry truly believed we were really close to getting to the Super Bowl since we did so well in the 2007. This lead to Jerry giving away our 2009 draft for Roy Williams, who ended up being a complete bust.
The 2008 season was a complete disaster ending in a pure embarrassment as we closed out Texas Stadium with a loss and got destroyed by the Eagles.
2009 Season
The Cowboys and Wade Phillips looked to be on the ropes, until the miracle win over the Saints happened and we managed to sneak into the playoffs. We managed to beat the Eagles in a playoff game and this secured Wade Phillips' job.
Anyways, the point of this thread is that 2007 is where all the "talent" BS started being spewed around and probably extended Wade Phillips' time here as a coach by at least a year and a half. I believe this directly correlates with bad drafting (drafting for depth and lack of competition) that we saw from 2007 - 2010.